Not all of your students will have English as their first language and these students are inherently at a disadvantage. The speed of delivery, a lecturer’s accent, the use of jargon or the general complexity of words used present barriers to student comprehension. This may even be true for students who come from an English speaking background as well. There are two solutions: 1. providing video content with English captions and 2. creating glossaries to accompany each lecture. Data shows both are heavily used, regardless of a student’s background.

Using a pre-course questionnaire (see 'TiP: Getting to know your students and what they need for success'), I discovered over a third of students (32-35%) in my 3rd year zoology course were from non-English speaking backgrounds. Through a UNSW Faculty of Science Student Experience grant, I added foreign language subtitling to all the course’s video content. As part of the process, accurate English captions were created as well. 

Data from post-course surveys of students across several years revealed most students relied heavily on captioned content (55-57%), regardless of their language background. While foreign language subtitles were appreciated by students, few students in fact used them (<5%). Instead, students used English captioned content to practice their English comprehension or because they were accessing content in public spaces, such as on public transport or in the library. 

There are third party vendors that provide accurate English captions at affordable rates. Alternatively, both YouTube and Teams have the capacity to generate English captions of your content for no cost. In both cases, however, it’s advisable to edit the scripts created for accuracy (NB: YouTube captions are fair; Teams captions seem to be better).

You can use the scripts generated from English-captioning to identify technical terms, other jargon or phrases related to complex concepts to write glossaries for each lecture. Admittedly, this can be a lot of work, but you could use ChatGPT or some other AI to create a rough draft first, which you then use as a base for revision. Alternatively, you can get your students to create the glossaries themselves as part of a low-stakes assessment.

Data from post-course surveys of students across several years shows glossaries are heavily used by both non-English and English native speakers (81% of enrolled students), partly for clarifying technical language but also to gain more information on difficult concepts.

Here's a 5 minute video summarising the data on student engagement with foreign language subtitles, English-captions and technical glossaries: