Curriculum Innovation: Integrating QM into undergraduate programmes in Linguistics in the School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University.

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At Aston, in common with many other universities, Linguistics/Applied Linguistics is taught as part of undergraduate programmes (UG) in English, English Language (EL) and Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), the latter of which at Aston, comprises of French, German, Spanish and Translation Studies. UG students may take these subjects as single or joint honours programmes. UG programmes in EL and MFL sit within the same School, the School of Languages and Social Sciences (LSS). This combination of disciplines within a School is not common, and has enabled colleagues in EL and MFL, particularly in German, to collaborate on joint research projects with a pedagogical focus (see section 6 below). In addition, various other research projects in EL have produced various data sets upon which this project can draw in producing QM learning and teaching (L&T) materials. This proposal, therefore is, in the first instance, to design, implement and integrate QM within the EL and MFL:German UG programmes at Aston with a view to extend dissemination of QM teaching beyond these groups to linguistics students studying other languages. Linguistics students are different from other social science students such as psychologists or sociologists for example, because many will have given up maths based subjects at 16 and will not have studied maths beyond GCSE level. Given multidisciplinary degrees, this is an issue for the majority of students who come to languages and linguistics UG programmes via a post 16 humanities curriculum. More specifically, UG Programmes in MFL, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics have also appeared increasingly to move away from any teaching of QM and focus almost exclusively on the collection and analysis of primary data. Thus, the fragile teaching base of QM in social science UG programmes as identified by MacInnes (2009:2), is virtually absent in UG programmes which contain modules in EL/MFL/Linguistics/Applied linguistics. However, increasingly, postgraduate and research students in these subjects are either being required to, or want to, apply QM methods to the analysis of data, with an ensuing skills gap when such students do not have the foundational skills required to undertake such activity. Currently at Aston, QM in EL and MFL:German is taught at UG level in small amounts, mainly through second and third level modules in corpus linguistics and forensic linguistics. Students produce excellent coursework in such modules, which could be further improved by the incorporation of QM data and methods. This is particularly true of modules such as: Language as Evidence and The Linguistics of the Individual. However, on the whole, colleagues in both EL and MFL shy away from incorporating QM into the curriculum and assessment of their modules, mainly because their own education and research have lacked QM. As a result, the PI and Co-PIs acknowledge that our UG programmes in EL and MFL are weaker for this, and that the employability of our graduates would be strengthened as a result of incorporating QM into the UG curriculum at all levels. The students' learning experiences surrounding the initiatiative will be researched throughout the duration of the project and at the beginning and end of periods QM teaching attitudes towards QM and numeracy more generally will be evaluated.