Strategic plan - teaching and learning

While we are determined to hold our strong position in national league tables, we also recognise that NSS scores are notoriously volatile and not always a reliable guide to teaching efficacy. The creation of new Department of Chinese Studies has provided us with an opportunity to re-think from first principles what a language degree in the increasingly digitalised world of the 2020s should look like. We will use the next University Review of Teaching and Learning to re-assess our current practices and to explore ways of increasing the number of students progressing from sub-honours to honours across all languages. Recent experience has highlighted the potential of a more proactive engagement with technology enhanced learning, and we will be reflecting on this experience and on how an appropriate package of structured training might be developed in order to integrate this more effectively into our standard practices (including our use of the Multi-Media Centre). In conjunction with University-led initiatives to develop shared multi-media facilities we will update our own Multi Media Centre to ensure that it is capable of supporting digitally-enhanced language learning across all our languages at the highest levels.

Our teaching and learning strategy is driven by five underlying objectives:

• Maintaining our unique breadth and depth of research-led teaching, and ensuring that our curriculum is inclusive, diverse, and flexible.
• Proactively addressing the challenge of declining numbers of students taking languages and the diminishing provision of language teaching at secondary level, especially in non-fee-paying schools.
• Developing and consolidating new and existing collaborations with international partners to ensure that, even after Brexit, all students have the opportunity to study abroad
• Finding ways (including TEL) of delivering our teaching more efficiently, reducing the burden of assessment, and promoting undergraduate research.
• Maintaining the balance between high-level language competency and in-depth cultural understanding that enhances the employability of our graduates

By pursuing these five inter-locking objectives our overall aim is to ensure that all our graduates - regardless of their educational or social background and whether they have the opportunity at school to learn a language - enjoy the benefit from research-led teaching of the highest quality, and have the opportunity to maximise their intellectual potential and their capacity to pursue a wide range of professional careers. In this way we also aim to maintain our current excellent standing in national league tables.

In order to achieve these objectives we will:

• Continue to make strategic appointments that not only maintain our existing breadth of coverage in teaching, but also open up new areas of interdisciplinary and transnational teaching that are targeted at School-wide cohorts.
• Review our curriculum to ensure that it appeals to students from a wide range of different educational, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds (including those under-represented in the School, e.g. BAME students).
• Analyse our student intake (both internally and externally) on an annual basis to ensure that it bears comparison with the highest standards of Widening Participation.
• Use the upcoming URLT to consider the effectiveness of existing Sub-Honours programmes (especially in terms of motivating students to progress to Honours).
• Construct a business case for the introduction of ab initio / intermediate teaching in those languages where it does not already exist in order to fulfil our commitment to making the study of languages to degree level open to all regardless of educational background.
• Improve provision for intermediate level study in order to recognise the differing needs of incoming students and support progression through their degree.
• Build on the establishment of strategic partnerships such as the University of Bonn and Karlova University with the aim of all departments in SoML having an identifiable strategic partner.
• Compare contact hours in language-teaching at other HEIs to ensure that what we are offering our students is commensurate with that offered by our competitors (while recognising that a ‘one-size fits all’ approach to different languages/language-learners is unlikely to be appropriate).
• Analyse staff-student ratios across SoML as a whole whenever a post falls vacant (while recognising that departmental SSRs are only one factor in driving appointments).
• Build on our current experience of TEL in order to identify areas of best practice in the delivery of both teaching and assessment (while recognising that the primary role of TEL is to enhance and extend our basic provision of face-to-face teaching).
• Explore ways of using TEL to improve the research skills and digital literacy of our graduates (thereby boosting their employability).

Key performance indicators of success in all the above areas will include:

• Maintaining our top 5 position within national league tables.
• An increase in the number of students taking up language study at Sub-Honours and a higher overall rate of retention into honours.
• An increase in the overall number of FTEs studying abroad.
• An increase in engagement with schools to promote language learning.