The Graduate Certificate in Business (GCIB) at Hertfordshire Business School (HBS)  is a 15 week  pre-master’s programme with the aim of preparing students for a range of Business related Masters courses. In order to achieve its aim, the programme attempts to present the language and content together as an integrated whole. For that reason, the teaching is organised around the subject lecturer and the English lecturer working together.

The idea is one of team teaching (Johns & Dudley-Evans, 1980; Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). Of the several levels of subject-language integration mentioned by Dudley-Evans & St John (1998), team teaching is the final level, as it involves subject and language specialists working together for some of the time in the classroom. It however goes further than as the materials – written and spoken – drawn on by the language teacher are those used by the subject lecturer in teaching the subject. More importantly, the tasks carried out in the language classes are those that are required by the subject lecturer.

There are two main reasons for our choice of teaching method. The first is linguistic: as Hyland (2000) has made clear, disciplines differ in their uses of language. As an EAP teacher cannot be expected to be an expert in every discipline, a team-teaching method seems to be a good way to deal with this lack of expertise. Secondly, as many of the students are primarily interested in developing their business knowledge and skills rather than their language, integrating the language with the content is motivating and leads to increased learning (Brinton, Snow & Wesche, 1989; Hamilton, 2010; Nordmeyer, 2010).

However, Dudley-Evans and St John’s belief (1998) that one reason that this kind of teaching is successful is because the roles of the two teachers are clearly defined does not seem to be realised in practice. In the reality of the classroom, it seems difficult, or impossible, to distinguish between teaching business and teaching the language of business, especially in a subject such as accounting. Language does not exist in isolation, but is strongly connected with what people do with it, with their linguistic practices (Coffin & Donohue, 2014; Lillis and Scott, 2007). Furthermore, the subject teacher cannot teach the content of the subject without using language. So as Bullock (1975) makes clear: “all teachers are teachers of language”.

Our approach sees developing language and business content as two sides of the same coin. This applies equally to the linguistic as well as other skills and practices that the students are expected to develop. As Wingate (2006) has pointed out, it is not possible to separate learning how to study in higher education from the practices of the content subjects, and this needs to be discussed in the context of students’ overall academic development. For that reason out-of-context or “bolt-on” (Bennett, Dunne & Carré, 2000) study-skills courses, as opposed to those that are integrated or embedded, are unlikely to be effective (Wingate, 2006). As well as the problem that these skills form an integral part of the subject practices, there is also the danger that these courses “may not be taken seriously by students as they are not seen to be relevant to disciplinary study” (Bennett, Dunne & Carré, 2000, p. 166) and need to be taught “within the disciplinary setting” (Bennett, Dunne & Carré, 2000, p. 166). For this reason, our approach is to embed the learning of language and its associated practices into the subject teaching.

This is our basic teaching philosophy. However, although it is clear to us that the subject and language need to be integrated when teaching, it is worth asking to what extent can the language, or content, be separated out in the assessment? Is it possible to test accounting content, in this case, without testing language? Moreover, is it possible to test language without taking into account the content? Bridgeman & Carlson’s (1984) survey of subject specialist staff shows that content, answering the question and addressing the topic were the most important in writing tasks. Therefore, English lecturers need to take content seriously when assessing students’ performance.

In order to investigate this, my colleague Sarah Beaumont and I (Beaumont & Gillett, 2013) decided to investigate the business and language lecturers’ marking of the students’ oral production and see to what extent the two markers’ grades were independent of each other.

The aim of the module we teach on is to provide an applied understanding of the role and function of financial information in the decision and communication process of an organisation. It provides an understanding of how accounting data is gathered and how financial information is used to plan, monitor and control the progress of the organisation. Students are expected to apply these techniques to particular industry sectors and organisations.

To reflect the range of assessment activities required of students on a post-graduate programme (Gillett & Hammond, 2009), the GCIB uses a wide range of assessment tasks. The module is wholly assessed by coursework, consisting of an individual written report and a group discussion. For the former, the students write a report interpreting a set of published accounts. For the latter, students work in groups of three to five to prepare a 10-minute discussion on the usefulness and future of budgeting.

The assignments are marked jointly by both of the lecturers, with the marks weighted equally. The business lecture comments on and grades the business content, including knowledge of the subject and use of specific technical language. The English lecturer comments on and grades the language, including fluency of interaction, organisation and coherence, pronunciation, and accuracy.

In the group discussion element of the assessment of the module described here, students work in multinational/multilingual groups to take part in an assessed discussion on the usefulness and future of budgeting.

The marking was investigated from two angles: a quantitative comparison of the marks given by the English lecturer and the Business lecturer and a more qualitative comparison between the two lecturers’ views of a few selected pieces of conversation between students.

As part of the Managing Accounting Information module in the summer of 2010, a large section of the assessment of this module was a business discussion on the nature of budgeting. The discussion had two components. Firstly the group presented the findings from their research, with each group member contributing a section. This was followed by discussion with other groups. Although there was no independent language assessment, the marking scheme for this business discussion included components for business knowledge and academic skills as well as competence in English. Both these components were rated using rating scales (Upshur & Turner, 1995; Fulcher, 2003) and recorded on a mark sheet.

Each student was given a grade for their performance and comments were made. As the groups were multilingual we needed to assess their abilities of the students interacting with each other in this ELF (Jenkins, 2011) situation. We could then compare the business lecturers’ assessment of the students’ competence in business knowledge and skills with the English lecturers’ assessment of their English language ability. From this we could then draw conclusions about the relationship between the two, the difficulties of assessment of the two strands separately, and whether it is useful or necessary. Each student was given a grade for a range of categories. Correlations between the different categories were calculated and the total language mark was plotted against the total content mark.

The correlation coefficient shows the relationship between the two markers. It was clearly seen that the coefficients were in the range 0.8-0.97, which shows a strong (Cohen, 1988, pp. 79-81) relationship between the language marks and the content marks. The plot of total language mark to total content mark showed a good straight line fit with an R-squared (coefficient of determination) value of 0.7815. This suggests that there is a degree of dependence between the various categories. It is therefore possible to predict the results obtained in one category from those obtained in another category (Gravetter & Wallnau, 1996, pp. 500-505). In other words, the different categories are to some extent measuring the same abilities.

The more qualitative assessment looking at the comments by the two lecturers showed similar results. There is a general agreement between the assessment of the business content by the business lecturer and that of the language quality by the language lecturer. This is not surprising as if the language is very bad, then the business lecturer would not be able to assess the content and vice-versa.

Our results therefore support our suggestion that language and business content are best seen as two sides of the same coin and cannot be separated. It would be unreasonable to expect high quality content with weak language or highly competent language that lacks content knowledge. From a summative assessment point of view then, it would seem that the language lecturer is not contributing much. This is not to say that the language lecturer does not contribute to the assessment because from a formative point of view, the feedback from the language lecturer is essential.

References

Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baker, D. (1989). Language testing: A critical survey and practical guide. London: Edward Arnold.

Beaumont, S. & Gillett, A. J. (2013). An investigation into the role of spoken English competence in an assessed business discussion in an ELF context. In J. Wrigglesworth (Ed.), EAP within the higher education garden: Cross-pollination between disciplines, departments and research (pp. 171-179). Reading: Garnet Education.

Bennett, N., Dunne, E. & Carré, C. (2000). Skills development in higher education and employment. Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.

Bridgeman, B. & Carlson, S. B. (1984). Survey of academic writing tasks. Written Communication, 1, 247-280.

Brinton, D. M., Snow, M. A. & Wesche, M. B. (1989). Content-based instruction. New York: Newbury House.

Bullock, A. (1975). The Bullock report: A language for life. London: HMSO.

Coffin, C. & Donohue, J. (2014). A language as social semiotic based approach to teaching and learning in higher education. Oxford: Wiley.

Cohen, J. W. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioural sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dudley-Evans, T. & St John, M. J. (1998). Developments in English for specific purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fulcher, G. (2003). Testing second language speaking. Harlow: Pearson.

Gillett, A. J. & Hammond, A. C. (2009). Mapping the maze of assessment: An investigation into practice. Active Learning in Higher Education, 10, 120–137.

Gravetter, F. J. & Wallnau, L. B. (1996). Statistics for the behavioural sciences (4th ed.). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company.

Hamilton, E. (2010). Motivating students to develop their English literacy skills through science. In J. Nordmeyer & S. Barduhn (Eds.), Integrating language and content (pp. 231-240). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

Jenkins, J. (2011). Accommodating (to) ELF in the international university. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 926-936.

Johns, T. F. & Dudley-Evans, A. (1980). An experiment in team teaching of overseas postgraduate students of transportation and plant biology. In Team teaching in ESP (ELT Documents 106, pp. 6–23). London: British Council.

Lillis, T. & Scott, M. (2007). Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4, 5–32.

Nordmeyer, J. (2010). Putting content-based second language instruction in context. In J. Nordmeyer & S. Barduhn (Eds.), Integrating language and content (pp. 1-16). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

Upshur, J. A. & Turner, C. E. (1995). Constructing rating scales for second language tests. ELT Journal, 49, 3–12.

Wingate, U. (2006). Doing away with study skills. Teaching in Higher Education, 11, 457–469.