IELTS score of 6.0 and took the summer content-based pre-sessional in order to make up the 0.5 shortfall in her language entry requirement. While Mai’s pre-sessional programmes had either been English for general academic purposes or, over the summer had moved towards having a science focus but in a broad sense, Lin’s programme had been created in collaboration with a teacher from her receiving academic School. The content of the programme focused on foundational theories and knowledge for her discipline and the assessments she took were written to enable her to develop an understanding of her disciplinary discourse norms. At the end of the pre-sessional programme, Lin achieved an overall score of 60, which was 5 marks above the agreed expected level for entry to her TPG programme.
On the final day of the pre-sessional programme, the EAP unit held a ‘transition’ event. Through this, students presented their developing understanding of their own identity as students of their discipline, relating this to key theories of identity that they had studied on the programme (see Bond, 2019). Teachers from their receiving School attended this event, and also took part in a symposium where they answered questions from the student audience. In this way, a clear link between the teaching and learning on the EAP pre-sessional programme and their future TPG programme was established. The language and discourse studied was centred on that of the discipline. This connection continued into the academic year as an EAP teacher was employed to work specifically in this School, to teach insessional EAP classes that supported the TPG programmes and offer individual consultations. Thus Lin, as well as all her peers in this School, had continued access to language support throughout the year, and the messages she received from both EAP and subject teachers were consistent around the importance of language use and communication in her discipline.
Within the School, in contrast to Mai’s context, there was a consensus around the difficulties that language created and an understanding that the discipline was centred on language use and nuanced argument created by its expert manipulation. Whilst teachers in this School, as in Mai’s, did not see language work as part of their own remit, they did see a need to collaborate with EAP tutors to enable students to develop a discipline-specific language knowledge.
While Mai found herself on a programme that had a small cohort (8 students) from a range of countries and backgrounds yet chose to develop close relationships only with the one other Chinese student on the programme, thus avoiding the need to communicate in English, Lin was on a programme with 53 students enrolled on it, 44 of whom were from mainland China. For Lin, the path of least resistance would have been to establish partnerships and relationships with other Chinese speakers. It was clear from the beginning of my contact with her that she was determined not to do this.
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