A little about what we do at NCL

The Communication and English teaching team deliver a range of courses and units cross college. The main focus of teaching can be divided into the following areas:

• Delivery of Core Skills (Communication) and HN (Communication) units on a large number of vocational Programmes
• Higher English through the Highers and evening class programmes
• Regular evening classes delivered to HN Engineering cohorts
• Strathclyde University Engineering Academy provision
• Occasional commercial courses

Specifically, we teach the following SQA Units:

• SCQF levels 3, 4, 5 and 6 Core Skills (Communication)
• Communication (NC) and Literature One - when taken together, this provides a qualification equivalent to a C pass at SQA Higher English
• Introduction to Literature
• Communication: Practical Skills (HN)
• Business Communication (HN)
• Research Skills (HN)
• Academic Skills - modular and non-modular
• Higher English

It has been a longstanding conviction, and a cornerstone of the team's professional practice, that effective learning and teaching must be flexible, innovative and harnessed to the need to develop a full range of capacities in learners. We believe Communication and English provision has always been responsive to the need to develop vocational skills and to undertake an integrative and more inclusive approach to learning.

Our learning, teaching and assessment strategy helps our students to be successful, confident, responsible and effective. Our learners engage in a lot of work that is self-reflective, addressing a number of interesting themes, such as sustainability, employability and citizenship, for example.

We provide a unique service at both the Coatbridge and Motherwell campuses, which is open to learners who have been unsuccessful in their assessments in semester one / block 1 or 2. This enables learners to be reassessed, sometimes by a different lecturer, to help them achieve their Communication Unit. This service is not a mechanism to take all three assessments though. Lecturers will provide the assessor with information about the student to ensure they are supported fairly and accurately. This has proved to be a very helpful initiative across a number of years. As always, learners are provided with detailed feedback on their assessment / re-assessment performance.

The teaching team are committed to develop successful areas of best practice in teaching. As a team, we feel we have been dynamic in trying to develop an integrative approach to learning that is genuinely meaningful and valuable to learners.