Mentoring High-Impact Undergraduate Research Experiences

This article illustrates the Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors with examples for English studies. The authors include both one-to-one and research-team examples, recognizing that although much English scholarship is solitary, peers and near peers play key roles in high-quality, mentored undergraduate research experiences.

Rethinking Research in English with Nontraditional Adult Students

Adult students of diverse experiences, disciplines, and identities can become valued contributors to faculty-directed research while also benefiting from the experience. However, national data show that older students participate in mentored research at one of the lowest rates among all groups tracked. This article forwards principles for facilitating nontraditional students’ involvement in collaborative research. These were developed during studies conducted about and with adult undergraduates at a historically Black university. Student researchers’ insights, adult learning theory, and the scholarship of undergraduate research and mentoring indicate interlacing benefits that students, faculty, and English studies may gain from developing such research partnerships.

Writing Centers

Undergraduate-staffed writing centers, tutor-preparation courses, and writing center studies have been and continue to be ideally suited for undergraduate research in English studies. Though requiring resources, planning, and a reconsideration of humanities scholarship, the benefits of writing center undergraduate research are many, including enabling students to develop unique and authentic questions and answers while enhancing their research and tutoring skills, reframing students’ roles within higher education, and preparing humanities majors for a range of career paths.

Students` Perspectives on the Use of Innovative and Interactive Teaching Methods at the University of Nouakchott Al Aasriya, Mauritania: English Department as a Case Study

This study was carried to inspect students` views on the use of innovative and interactive teaching methods used in the English studies major at the University of Nouakchott Al Aasriya, Mauritania. This was a corollary of the fact that innovation in teaching, regardless the nature of the course or subject, has become a buzz word in the academic institutions. A quantitative research methodology was used and the data were collected from 101 students from the English Department. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS as an attempt to provide descriptive statistics to verify the students` perception of the use of innovative and interactive teaching methods. The findings of the study revealed that 91.1% of the students believe that their teachers do use some of the innovative and interactive teaching methods in their classes; still, 70.3% of the respondents were in favor of continuous trainings for teachers on the use of innovative and interactive teaching methods, which is a very alarming percentage. Also, the findings of this study have some significant implications such as the necessity to move from teaching to learning as an attempt to make learning an enjoyable and memorable experience. The results of this study contribute to literature by concentrating on the use of innovative and interactive teaching methods in Mauritanian higher education institutes. Keywords: Innovative, Interactive, Teaching Methods, Students, Higher Education, Mauritania

EMI and the Teaching of Cultural Studies in Higher Education: A Study Case.

This paper examines students’ perspectives on the challenges raised by their first encounter with EMI pedagogy in higher education. The research was conducted with a group of beginner students with no previous experience in monolingual instruction in English. The case studied is based on two English Cultural Studies subject courses of the English Studies Program at a Spanish university and taught in a learning environment of total linguistic immersion. By activating their metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, students were encouraged to take ownership of the stages of their learning process and assess it critically. Set at the intersection of EFL, ESP, and EAP, the specificities of these courses comprising linguistic and non-linguistic contents shed light on the teaching procedures employed in English Departments training programs, whose goals are to turn undergraduates into expert linguists and philologists and maximise their communicative proficiency in academic English.

EMI and Intercultural Competence at University of Alcalá: The case of the Master's Degree in Teacher Training

The use of English as a Medium of Instruction to teach subjects other than English is widely spread across European higher education institutions. The University of Alcalá has been working on the implementation of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) for decades now. The internationalisation process accounts for the increasing number of studies both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels taught in English. The response of international students has been positive considering the University of Alcalá one of their favourite Spanish destinations. The interaction of local and foreign students evidences the need to raise awareness towards the intercultural competence as part of the Master’s Degree in Teacher Training, so that learners will feel comfortable in a different language and culture and contribute significantly not only to the labour market but also to dialogue and living together. In this article, the authors report on how this is done in one of the compulsory courses of this specific Master’s Degree: Complementary Training in English Studies.

Evoke

This article provides an introduction to the web application Evoke. This application offers functionality to navigate, view, extend, and analyse thesaurus content. The thesauri that can be navigated in Evoke are expressed in Linguistic Linked Data, an interoperable data form that enables the extension of thesaurus content with custom labels and allows for the linking of thesaurus content to other digital resources. As such, Evoke is a powerful research tool that facilitates its users to perform novel cultural linguistic analyses over multiple sources. This article further demonstrates the potential of Evoke by discussing how A Thesaurus of Old English was made available in the application and how this has already been adopted in the field of Old English studies. Lastly, the author situates Evoke within a number of recent developments in the field of Digital Humanities and its applications for onomasiological research.

The Impact of Audio-Visual Aids on Learning English among MSU Third-Year Students

This study investigates the efficacy of audio-visual technologies in assisting MSU third-year students in learning English vocabulary. The interplay of audio-visual aids in educational conversations has been researched from a variety of perspectives (Tuovinen, 2000). Multimedia is a multimodal experience in which information is communicated through text, graphics, pictures, audio, and video. It has been demonstrated that a combination of words and images always carries a substantial quantity of information (Mayer, 2018: 55). The use of multimedia in teaching and learning. The goal of this research is to determine the efficiency of audiovisual aids in the learning of English vocabulary among MSU third-year students. The use of multimedia in instruction and learning threatens the foundations of higher education. The current study investigates how third-year students at Malaysia's Management and Science University use multimedia in their English studies (MSU). To fulfill the study's aims, the researchers used both a qualitative and quantitative approach. An online poll of 200 students enrolled in the Bachelor of English as a second language program was used to construct the study corpus (BTESL). In addition, 150 MSU students from the same program were polled. The study's findings indicate that multimedia inspires BTESL students to learn English creatively and engagingly. It also aroused students' attention and compelled them to learn new terms. Multimedia, according to the study, is an excellent tool for third-year English students. It also helps students enhance their understanding of correct terminology and language.