The School of Education collaborated with the School of Film, Media and Journalism to examine linguistically inclusive teaching in higher education. The project was facilitated by the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Teaching & Learning Innovation Fund 2023/24.
Elizabeth Bailey (School of Education and project lead) and Sam Shipley (School of Film, Media and Journalism) held focus groups with students who were (a) bilingual (b) first in their family to university and (c) neurodivergent to ascertain what linguistic barriers, if any, they felt impacted their success at university. The project team then worked with these students to co-create guidance around linguistically inclusive classroom and assessment practices for staff members at the university.
We know that one’s perceptions of their linguistic abilities can be related to their sense of belonging (Burke et al., 2018) and, as such, (sometimes arbitrary) linguistic expectations placed on students can have exclusionary consequences within teaching, learning and assessment. Linguistic barriers are seldom talked about in the higher education context and yet, addressing them has the potential to impact many students’ lives as every student uses language to access learning.
The project identified six ways in which students can be supported in sessions:
- avoiding tacit assumptions
- providing variety
- scaffolding
- ‘open door’ policies
- awareness of additional processing demands
- the provision of additional time.
Beyond this, the impact of linguistic expectations was prevalent within the data from students, as well as a tension between an awareness that language is subjective, its importance in assessment (in terms of grammar) paired with an acceptance that they were likely to be disproportionately penalised for linguistic/stylistic issues.
The findings were shared at a University of Lincoln conference which brought together other speakers looking at linguistic-related inclusion, more broadly. They were also shared at the Advance HE Teaching and Learning conference. Moving forward, the co-created guidance will be disseminated more widely within the institution and a follow-up project looking at the language used in rubrics will be undertaken.
