Developing a language syllabus for computer science

I was the first Language Centre lecturer to be embedded in the School of Computing, for two days a week 2019-2022. I supported the PGT cohort (MSc Advanced Computer Science either on its own or with a specialism of Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence or Data Analytics) which had greatly increased in number over recent years. I offered weekly one-to-one sessions for those students who had not met the minimum requirement on the Language Centre’s summer pre-sessional, and drop-in appointments and tutor referrals for the rest of the cohort. I also wrote weekly hour long classroom sessions for all students on the modules Data Science, Parallel Computation, Cloud Computing and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning under the title ‘Academic Language for Computing’. These used excerpts from lecture recordings to focus on listening and vocabulary, as well as excerpts from reading list texts, past exam papers and student samples.  

During the pandemic it became impractical to source module-specific material and I offered a programme-specific series of workshops instead: 

• How to understand assignments 
• How to understand spoken instructions 
• How to read effectively 
• How to understand lectures 
• How to write under exam conditions 
• How to write reports and other text types 

In Semester Two, I collaborated with the head of the MSc Project to provide a series of sessions which dovetailed with the schedule for supervisor meetings and provisional documents: 

• Starting your project 
• Communicating with your supervisor 
• Background reading 
• Drafting the Project Specification Form 
• Drafting the Scoping and Planning Document 
• Drafting the Scoping and Planning Document II 
• Drafting the Ethics Appendix 
• Writing Chapter 1 
• The Literature Review 
• Drafting chapter 2 
• Drafting chapter 3 

During Semester One of 2021-2022 I was able to take advantage of the pandemic-induced January cohort’s unique schedule to help individual students as they were finishing their MSc Project, which normally takes place during the summer when Language Centre lecturers are busy with pre-sessionals.

Semester Two of that year was spent developing a proposal for a bespoke Computing summer pre-sessional module. This involved the collection and analysis of input texts, assessed tasks, assessment rubrics and student work from previous years including marks and feedback from all four MSc Advanced Computer Science programmes. It also involved collating colleagues’ and students’ ideas around learning outcomes and objectives for a bespoke pre-postgraduate six week preparatory academic language course and collaboration with a nominated academic lead from Computing. My review of the literature was limited but began with ESAP (I found mostly genre-based approaches including corpus tools) and drilled down through ESAP in STEM, which mostly focused on analysis of novice report writing, and into ESAP in Computing, which was thin and tended to focus on expert writing (journal articles). I also looked at writing advice from computer scientists, which leant towards lists of prescriptive and proscriptive rules for students writing project reports.  

It has felt like important work to re-evaluate EAP provision for STEM and particularly for computing where the majority of assessed work is done not in English but in programming languages. It has been rewarding also to grapple with different views of the role of language in knowledge construction and dissemination. I’d like to thank everyone in the School of Computing for their help and patience!