NEW STRATEGIES FOR WRITING DEGREE DISSERTATIONS IN ENGLISH: PAIR-TUTORING AND TEACHING MINI-VIDEOS

Abstract

Writing academic texts in English is closely related to the linguistic competence that university students need to develop (B1 level as a minimum linguistic requirement prior to their graduation). This competence entails an improvement of their future employability (both at the national and international levels), their communicative competences in a second language (L2), and obviously also the possibility that the results derived from their academic projects spill across national boundaries. This innovation project arises as the evolution of a previous innovation strategy, approved and implemented at the University of Córdoba (“La tutoría piramidal como estrategia para el diseño y desarrollo del trabajo final de grado en educación”, 2015-2-6011), whose results allowed the identification of the weaknesses that we aim to focus on during the development of this project. The final objective is to teach university students how to write their end-of-degree dissertations in English. At the same time teachers of the UCO also participate in a series of seminars to know different techniques about how to review these projects that are written in a language different from their mother tongue or main language. The methodology of this project is based on participative seminars, as well as on the development of resources, where students (mentors and mentees) and teachers (mentors and mentees) collaborate towards a common objective: writing and reviewing end-of-degree dissertations, mainly written in English. Among these resources, it can be highlighted the design and elaboration of teaching mini-videos, with the participation of the teachers involved in the project, as well as the mentor students, in order to explain the key aspects to be considered when writing an end-of-degree dissertation.