Using a blended approach to offer academic support to non-native English speakers: A Middle Eastern perspective

As the number of students flying to the UAE to pursue higher education continues to skyrocket, one of the challenges that universities confront is how to ease the integration of these students in the education system to enable them to perform at their best. Effective education takes place when students are able to participate fully and benefit from that education. While a number of research look at the transition of students from secondary schools to universities, the aim of this research is to explore how to integrate international postgraduate students, who are transitioning from their local universities to an international British university, in the Middle East. The action research method was adopted as a number of workshops were run based on students’ feedback and the module requirement. The workshops were run by a discipline expert and English for academic purposes expert, both having over 10 years of teaching experience in the higher education sector and in multiple contexts. Key findings highlight that teaching academic skills and particularly essay writing using the actual assessment that students had to work on made a huge difference in terms of impacts of learning.