Working Without Faculty Input

• Ask for access to the VLE, reading lists and module handbooks for STEM courses.
• Mine student materials—lab handouts, exams, presentations—for vocabulary and genre insight.
• Encourage students to bring texts from their subject area; model on one you understand.
• Use public engagement tasks (e.g. outreach scenarios) where clear communication is needed.
• Flip roles – invite students to share content knowledge while you own your expertise in language and communication
• Use visuals (e.g. diagrams, processes) as the common ground.

🎯 Boosting Student Engagement

• Link tasks and timing of input to assignments—use briefs, marking criteria, and exam formats where possible.
• Use real-world communication scenarios (e.g. explaining to a non-expert or family member).
• Offer choices rather than rigid answers—foster agency and relevance.
• Highlight difference to previous courses. Reframe expectations post-IELTS (e.g. clarity and precision over variety and complexity).
• Provide rationale for tasks.

📘 Making STEM Texts Accessible

• Use related articles or blogs to scaffold understanding of original research papers. How else has the author disseminated work?
• Focus on noticing interactional features: hedging, boosting, audience relationship. (The non-technical elements of the text.)
• Encourage students to tolerate ambiguity.
• Try “regenre-ing” (e.g. abstract → infographic or blog; blog → academic paragraph).
• Use dictogloss to focus attention on key message and structure.
• Analyse moves within a section of the article. What is it doing?
• Highlight theme-rheme progression to build understanding of how ideas unfold.
• Show students that negative language in a research article introduction, indicates the gap is coming.

✍️ Supporting Academic Writing Without Subject Expertise

• Provide students with prompts to ask staff in their discipline e.g. Why is it written this way?
• Combine peer feedback on content with teacher feedback on structure and clarity.
• Focus on genre features and meta-discourse: how authors position themselves, guide the reader, build credibility.
• Scaffold writing from shared texts, public-facing examples, or visuals.
• Create an AI Chatbot using course/subject area materials that staff can interrogate.
• Scaffold students engaging with texts from their sub-genre e.g. supervisor’s publications for PhD students.

🗣️ Building Spoken Fluency in STEM Contexts

• Build soft/life skills withing the context of academic skills e.g. active listening in seminar discussions, interrupting and asking for clarification in lab setting,
• Use equipment/process visuals to prompt language production.
• Praise successful speaking in class.
• Practice with real-time speaking tasks: instructions, explanations, clarifications.
• Rehearse STEM scenarios using repetition and substitution—not just roleplay.
• Use dictogloss from spoken lab or demo transcripts to support structure and fluency.

🧩 Vocabulary Building for STEM Tasks

• Build a bank (and Corpus) of STEM Texts
• Create focused vocabulary tests for productive use (e.g. collocations, fixed expressions).
• Emphasise consistent and accurate use of terminology over variation.
• Use visuals or formulae to introduce and reinforce key vocabulary.
• Contrast academic use with what students learned for IELTS.

🧰 Assessment Design

• Design integrated tasks that reflect real communication needs in STEM.
• Encourage analysis of authentic student texts and assessment criteria.
• Keep marking criteria transparent and tied to communicative purpose.
• Tasks that communicate with a range of (non-expert) audiences.

Teacher Development

• Offer training sessions using real examples and sample outputs.
• Offer drop-in sessions for new staff.
• Provide mentoring.
• Ensure teaching materials are well-scaffolded with robust teaching notes.
• Build confidence by reminding tutors that they do not need to know/ understand the content and they are the academic language experts.

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