So, the lecture is the important vehicle of the course content; it carries the course content.
Now, the second point they made about lectures was that in China they don’t seem to be very interactive, in the sense that students sit, they listen, they make lots and lots of notes. But they don’t often ask questions during the lecture or at the end of the lecture, and they don’t have much discussion, either during or at the end of the lecture, and that is not expected of them. So they really, in China, lectures don’t seem to be very interactive.
Another point which students made to me, which I thought was interesting, was that the main points, the important points of a lecture, are often explicitly marked by the lecturer. The lecturer might say, ‘OK, this point is very important, make a note of this’ and might even write things on the blackboard, which the students would copy down verbatim. In other words, they would copy down exactly what he was writing. So this was interesting, it seems that the students don’t have to decide for themselves what is important, what is less important. The lecturer tells them. Now obviously that’s a very general and very rough caricature of what students told me about Chinese lectures. But how does that compare with the UK situation?
Well, in the UK, I think it’s fair to say that the course content is not only delivered through the lectures. If you study on a UK course and if you only give back to the lecturer in examinations, or tests, or assignments or essays, if you only give back what he or she says during the lecture, then I don’t think you are going to pass the exam, the course. I think what lecturers are doing in the UK is something different. I think either they are giving an overview of the main ideas connected with the subject, or they are giving some general background to the subject, and then it’s the student’s responsibility to go away, and to do lots of reading, and to really fill in the details, and to fully understand the theories, the ideas the lecturer is talking about.
And that really brings me to the point of reading. Because what I understood from my Chinese students was that in China, certainly at undergraduate level, they had one course book for each course, and just to emphasize that, they seemed to have one course book. And there was a very close correspondence between what the lecturer was saying and what was in the course book. In other words, if the students wanted to, they could go away at the end of the lecture and
74 English for Academic Study
read the course book, and it would essentially say what the lecturer himself had said, so there was that kind of reinforcement. In the UK it’s very different. There’s not one course book for one course. You can’t just go away and read one book, and find the entire content of the lectures there. You will have to read a lot of books and a lot of articles to fill in what the lecturer has given you. So in the UK, reading, and reading really widely, is an essential part of what students do after lectures. In China it seems that there is a lot less reading, and the reading is mainly concentrated on this one course book.
That’s one thing about the UK. The other thing about the UK, the UK lecture, is that lecturers here do expect students to interact, to ask questions, to raise points of view, to make comments, to enter into discussion. Now obviously how much discussion there is, how much interaction there is, depends very much on how many students there are in the lecture. Here at Reading, in some cases, we may have 20 students in a lecture and on other courses you may have 200 students in a lecture, and obviously there’s less discussion if there are more students. There’s less time for questions. But interactiveness in general is very important in the UK.
Well, those are just some of my impressions of the differences between lectures in China and the UK, but I would really be very interested now in hearing your opinions – whether you think what I’ve talked about is true from your experience or not.
Unit 2: Introductions to lectures
CD1 Track 6 Ex 1.4
Listen to the introduction. Then answer the questions.
Migration There has been a lot of talk recently in the newspapers and on television about immigration to the UK from countries joining the EU, countries like Poland, and more recently Romania and Bulgaria. This discussion is centred on questions like whether this is good for the British economy or not – in terms of productivity, or impact on national infrastructure, for example, on the health and education services, etc. However, that’s not the type of migration that I want to look at today. What I want to look at is internal migration, i.e., the movement of people from country to city, and vice versa, and from one city to another.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97
