Aileen Irvine

Reading in tertiary education: undergraduate student practices and attitudes

This paper reports the findings of a study of undergraduate student use of, and attitudes toward, textbooks and other assigned reading. More than 1200 students of various subjects at three Swedish universities were surveyed. Most students said reading played an important role in learning generally and attributed positive characteristics to their textbooks. However, students’ self-reported reading behaviour was at odds with these attitudes, with many students reporting some degree of non-compliance with reading assignments and a small group of students expressing active resistance to completing reading assignments. Although textbooks were perceived as valuable, students reported a preference for learning course content from other resources, such as lectures and lecture notes. Textbooks were perceived as alternatives, rather than complements, to attending class. Differences were found across academic disciplines. Implications of these findings for educational administration and classroom practice are discussed.

Engaging with terminology in the multilingual classroom: teachers’ practices for bridging the gap between L1 lectures and English reading

Abstract In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e. how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.