Staff profile

There are 19 full-time HEFCE-funded members of teaching staff, giving a staff:student ratio of 1:17.9 for tutorial responsibilities. However, our total teaching load in 1993-4 was only 207.52 FTEs because our students 'receive' more teaching from outside the department than we give to students from other departments. This is especially true of the BSc Speech Sciences, where we provide about 30% of the core teaching, the rest coming from the National Hospital's College of Speech Sciences (NHCSS; see Annex D) and other UCL departments. In terms of actual teaching, therefore, our staff:student ratio is 1:10.9. Of the 19 teachers, four are under 40, and eight are women.

Not all of our teachers are HEFCE-funded. One particularly important contributor is a British Academy Research Fellow, but 14 research students or research assistants are paid to help (under the supervision of a permanent member of staff, and according to College guidelines) with tutorials, with marking, or as lab class demonstrators.

Most courses are taught by people active in research into the subject concerned. The department's research has earned the top rating in all three research assessment exercises. Two of the staff are qualified Clinical Speech and Language Therapists, two are Fellows of the British Academy and one is currently holding a British Academy Research Leave grant. Our combined research experience is unusually broad, ranging from speech/hearing science through phonetics to linguistics; this breadth is reflected in our teaching, and by the fact that we straddle two faculties (Arts and Life Sciences).

We have four technical staff who maintain our laboratories and computers, and 4.3 fte administrative and clerical staff. Several of these staff-members make an important contribution to our teaching by running the laboratories, the Listening Centre, the departmental collection of reading material for students and the word-processing courses, all described more fully below.

Learning resources

All teaching staff have their own offices where they can see students individually or give small tutorials. Most offices are on a single site, at 20-21 Gordon Square, on the edge of the main UCL rectangle, only a few minutes walk from the main library, the refectories, and the Students' Union. This main site also contains workshops and an anechoic room (used for teaching and research).

The remaining teachers have offices in Wolfson House, five minutes walk from the main site; there we have a range of special-purpose teaching facilities (detailed below) as well as a library/seminar room and a lecture theatre.

We have two common rooms for students, and a room for research students. The common room on the main site has tables as well as easy chairs, and is used by BA and MA students as a place for working. There are several places nearby where students can buy coffee and refreshments. The common room in Wolfson House, which students share with staff, has facilities for making coffee and snacks. The other main teaching centre for the BSc students is the NHCSS, about 10 minutes walk from UCL, where they have another common room.

We have two small lecture rooms on the main site, one for our exclusive use, and one shared with other departments. Both are suitable for classes up to 25, and both have movable furniture which can be rearranged for group-based teaching. The one for our own use has a permanent video player. For classes too large for these rooms we use centrally timetabled rooms elsewhere in UCL, though we favour rooms near to the main site.

We are fortunate in having two dedicated computer rooms on the main site, with 12 networked 486 machines (and a laser printer) which students can use when they are not needed for computer teaching. We use them for word-processing courses and for courses which involve programming. Our students can also use the computer clusters which are provided centrally, but these are heavily booked. All students have an account on the UCL mainframe computer which allows them to use electronic mail (as an increasing number do). All our offices are networked, which allows us to communicate by electronic mail with each other (as well as with the outside world and even, increasingly, with students); a lot of our internal communications are about students, teaching or activities connected with 'Enterprise in Higher Education' (the UCL scheme for introducing innovation into teaching, mentioned again below). We already encourage students to word-process essays, but from 1995-6 this will become a requirement on the BA programmes.

Wolfson House has the best suite of facilities in Europe for teaching acoustic phonetics to undergraduates, consisting of a laboratory, computer rooms and individual cubicles; these facilities can accommodate 18 students, so we can teach all 50 members of a BSc cohort in three shifts. Students have free access to laboratories for project work. Wolfson House also contains a Listening Centre with 10 well-equipped cubicles for audio and video use, recording rooms and a large library of recorded phonetic material which students are encouraged to use.

For photocopying we use either departmental photocopiers or the very powerful machines provided centrally. Most of our classes are based on specially prepared photocopied handouts so these facilities are important for our teaching.

An important centrally-provided facility is the UCL Language Centre, where our BA students often take practical language courses, or even a course in TEFL, for which they are given course-unit credit (and which may count towards their degree class). The Language Centre can also help overseas students with their academic English.

On the main site we have a large departmental collection of articles and offprints for students to borrow. The main library for our students is, of course, the UCL library, with strong collections in both phonetics and linguistics (about 5,500 books and 80 current periodicals). The other linguistics collections nearby, at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Senate House, can also be used. The BSc students also have automatic access to the library at the NHCSS.

Content

The content of all our programmes is designed to meet as many as possible of our objectives:

Organisation

Undergraduate students take a combination of courses each of which is taught and examined separately from other courses. At any one time, it is normal for a student to be following about four courses and for a member of staff to be teaching two. This pattern is very helpful for all of us as it spreads the workload evenly across terms and across years.

Although courses are taught and examined independently, they are interconnected in the total programme so that advanced courses build on elementary ones. When students join us they are given a booklet for their programme which explains which courses they have to do and which choices they can make; ultimately the decisions are made in consultation with their personal tutor (whose role is explained more fully under 'Student Support and Guidance'). There are lists and information sheets on our courses, and other departments provide similar information on their courses.

The taught elements in the Masters programmes are mostly obligatory but students have some choice.

We all do at least some of our teaching in small groups (at most 16, often four or five, sometimes one), and since we generally also see students singly when we are advising them on projects and essays or when seeing them as personal tutors, we are able to get to know our students as individuals. Small group work constitutes about 50% of each student's contact hours.

Because of our favourable staff-student ratios and our research activities, our students all have a good deal of personal contact with people who are making world-class contributions to research in the subjects that they are studying. We all contribute to undergraduate teaching, where most final-year courses make use of the teacher's own current research; indeed, it is in the nature of our subjects for current research to be mentioned even in first-year courses. Students, especially postgraduates, are encouraged to attend 'interest group' meetings. We have, as teachers, produced a number of books for use in teaching. Between us we have written three popular introductions to linguistics and four undergraduate textbooks on specific areas, as well as monographs, dictionaries and edited collections which are used in teaching; and one of us edits a series of elementary textbooks. We coordinate Netphon, a government-funded project for developing computer-assisted teaching of phonetics and acoustics.

Most undergraduates and all postgraduates do a personal research project in which, under guidance, they can themselves make serious research contributions; for instance in one course students are regularly encouraged to carry out original research on their own local accent. A few undergraduates are regularly employed as research assistants during the summer.

Learning

Some of the above methods are clearly more interactive than others, but we recognise the need for students to participate actively and we are continually reviewing our methods to encourage deeper learning.

One obvious variation in the students' learning experiences is in the number of contact hours. On the BSc programme students typically have about 16-20 timetabled classes per week, in contrast with about eight or nine for the BA programmes. We feel that the BSc programme is overloaded, and we are exploring ways of reducing the contact hours.

Assessment

We use a variety of assessment methods:

The dominant modes of assessment are invigilated examinations (especially in the Masters programmes) and essays (especially in the BA programmes). The variety of methods makes it possible both to match assessment to the needs of the course, and also to give students a range of alternative assessment experiences.

All written work, including essays, is double-marked internally, and samples are sent to our external examiners. Scripts from all centrally organised exams are anonymous.

Students are officially assessed for each course, and told their marks, within the same academic year, and they may learn their provisional grades much sooner, so the official assessment system is an important source of feedback for students. Where a course is examined by essays, the students always see marked essays, with comments. Since we also tell students the formula that we apply in deciding their degree class the assessment system is very transparent and we have few complaints.

In common with other departments of linguistics and phonetics, most of our new undergraduates come to the subject with little or no knowledge of the subjects. Our first-year courses in phonetics and linguistics typically span the full range from school-level basic grammar to theoretical controversies which touch the frontiers of research.

However, the learning experience for our undergraduates does change through their programme. First-year BA courses tend to favour quite concrete learning - facts, concrete analytical skills and some rather basic theory and principles, with course-work as the dominant mode of assessment. Final year students deal with more abstract theory and generality, and are being assessed by means of substantial essays. As explained in Annex B, the 'major' subject ensures at least some increase in difficulty, though students who prefer to broaden their range of courses can do so. A similar progression is true of the BSc, although there is greater emphasis on analytical skills.

Progression to the next year in the undergraduate programmes is conditional on satisfactory performance, which normally means having passed at least three units for entry to the second year, and at least 6 (BA) or 6½ (BSc) for the third. We monitor student progress collectively in the main departmental teaching sub-committees for the BSc programmes and for the BA programmes, and it is these committees that decide whether or not to recommend the Faculty to allow a borderline student to progress to the next year (in conjunction with the other department in the case of Combined Honours students).

As explained above, the course-unit system guarantees year-by-year feedback to the students on their progress, but most courses also include some mechanism by which the students can gauge their progress before the final assessment for that course - either marked coursework and essays, or verbal feedback in practical exercise classes.

The figures in Annex A (Table C.1) show the progression rates for students who were registered in November 1992. The figures which cause concern are those for the BA Linguistics (and Combined Honours) programme, where only 58% of the first-year intake of 43 students progressed to the second year. These figures are exceptional but we are reviewing our monitoring procedures (in the departmental teaching sub-committees) to make sure that we are always aware of students with serious problems.

Achievement

If we measure achievement in terms of degree-classes the picture is encouraging (see Annex A). In 1994, 67% of our finalists graduated with a first or upper-second, and in the previous two years the figures were 51% and 56% respectively. This is of course only a crude measure of achievement. Our course-unit system allows us to issue graduates with an official transcript showing their exact marks in all the individual courses which they take, which is far more helpful both to students and to potential employers.

Neither of these measures takes account of achievements in non-academic areas of College life; for example, several of our students play an active part in the running of the Students' Union (including one elected as a sabbatical officer) and in student societies or teams. We value such achievements, and do our best to help students to reconcile the academic and non-academic demands on their time. Even harder to measure is the confidence which many of our students develop while living as students in London.

Our BSc graduates have no difficulty in finding suitable employment, usually in clinical practice or research. For BA graduates the employment picture is typical for humanities degrees, but naturally with a bias to employment in jobs connected with language (e.g. teaching or computing).

In addition to the support that we provide, students provide a certain amount for themselves, notably an active student society (the Linguistics Society) which organises social functions and provides volunteers to look after BA applicants when they visit the College.

Learning resources

As explained in the Framework section, our physical resources for teaching and learning - rooms, equipment, laboratories, libraries - are generally of high quality. However, although our students have access to more computers than in most Arts departments, the spare capacity that we have at present will be exhausted when more students use word-processors for essay-writing. This is a College-wide problem which is being addressed at the highest level.

Several of us also have a broader commitment to student welfare:

Historically we have tended to rely on informal structures within the Department for controlling and reviewing our teaching. Increasingly we have adopted the more formal arrangements described earlier, with a Departmental Teaching Committee coordinating a range of sub-committees for particular degree programmes. We welcome the formal impetus that the Quality Assessment exercise is giving.