Abstract

This presentation aims to explore the barriers multilingual academics face when providing students with feedback. Many members of staff, as well as students, draw on a wide range of linguistic repertoires in their daily lives, which impact on their identity and their engagement with their academic programmes. This rich resource is often neglected in the HE setting to the detriment of full inclusion in university life. University policies and practices frequently privilege a standard-English-only approach in which other repertoires are considered as somehow deficient. The project builds on the findings of a previous project (Lazar and Ryder, 2018) that explored how educational developers can incorporate a language-aware approach to feedback when working with staff involved in learning and teaching. While this small-scale project was successful in enhancing awareness among staff about the linguistic aspects of feedback, it also raised additional questions about the complexities of providing effective feedback, particularly for staff from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This current project focused on exploring these complexities further and aimed to unpack these issues from both an educational and linguistic point of view in order to identify some examples of best practice and thus aid clear communication and enhance students’ learning. This presentation will provide a concise overview of the research project and its main findings with the view of raising awareness of such issues and promoting a dialogue around equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education.

Expected outcomes of this session:

raise awareness and promote a dialogue around linguistic diversity in higher education and
how this hidden resource might be capitalised on when working with students and staff in higher education