English for administrative staff

Below, you can read more about academic language consultant Pete Westbrook's process and considerations when preparing an English course for administrative staff. This specific example is from a course for administrative staff at Roskilde University.

"In the spring of 2019, CIP got a request to run an English course for study administration staff who worked at Roskilde University’s ‘student hub’. This involves dealing with all kinds of student problems, and staff were finding that they needed to use more and more English to help international students.

As with all courses CIP runs, we sent out a needs analysis based on similar courses previously held and supplemented with information garnered from the student hub website and material sent by CIP’s contact person at the student hub.

Based on this information, I developed a 5-week course covering study administrative university terminology.  Research shows that vocabulary is the one consistent indicator of language proficiency. Based on my own research, this fact is reflected in needs analyses given that 'lacking specialist/technical terminology in English' is the most common difficulty mentioned by course participants.

Applying Task-Based Learning principles, the course was a combination of work-related tasks simulating ‘student hub’ communication between students and admin staff. In addition, the course featured several ‘Focus on Form’ activities to help participants acquire exactly the vocabulary they needed to carry out their student hub work in English.

The post-course evaluations were overwhelmingly positive, mainly because the course was so ‘targeted towards student hub words, terms and expressions’, as one participant put it. Mission accomplished!"