Tag Archive for: LISTENING

Dave: Well, l suppose it was because sending students off to various companies for work experience seems to be such a typical part of educational courses these days – I mean, even school kids get to do it. But _Q21 I felt everyone just kind of assumes it’s a good thing and l guess I wanted to find out if that’s the case.

Dr. Green: But you don’t look at schools or colleges, right? _Q22 You’ve stuck to university placement schemes.

Dave: Yeah, well, I quickly found that I had to limit my research, otherwise the area was just too big. Do you think that was OK?

Dr. Green: I think it’s very sensible, especially as the objectives might be very different. So how many schemes did you look at?

Dave: Well, I sent out about 150 questionnaires altogether – you know, 50 of each to university authorities, students, and companies, and _Q23  I got responses from 15 educational institutions, and.. er, 30 students in 11 individual companies.

Dr. Green: Great, that sounds like a good sample. And who did you send your company questionnaires to?

Dave: Well, _Q24 the idea was to have them done by the students’ Line Managers, but sometimes they were filled in by the Human Resources manager or even the owner of the company.

Dr. Green: Right. I didn’t find a full list anywhere, so _Q25 I think it’s very important to provide that, really. You can put it as an appendix at the back .

Dave: Right. _Q25 I’ve got a record of all the respondents so that’ll be easy. I hope other things were OK. I mean I’ve already put such a lot of work into this project, identifying the companies and so on.

Dr. Green: Oh, I can tell I think you’ve done a good job overall.

Dr. Green: I thought your questionnaires were excellent, and you’d obviously done lots of background reading, but there were a few problems with the introduction. First of all, _Q26 I think you need to make some slight changes to the organisation of your information there, at present, it’s a bit confused.

Dave: OK. What did you have in mind?

Dr. Green: Well, you write quite a bit about Work Placement in general, _Q27 but you never explain what you mean by the term.

Dave: _Q27 So you think I should give a definition? 

Dr. Green: _Q27 Exactly. And the introduction is the place to do it. And then look, you start talking about what’s been written on the topic – but it’s all a bit mixed up with your own project.

Dave: So do you think it would be better to have two sections there like, a survey of the literature as the introduction and then _Q28 a separate section on the aims of my research? 

Dr. Green: _Q28 I do. You can include your methods for collecting data in the second section too. It would be much dearer for your reader… you know, establish the background first, then how your work relates to it, it would flow quite nicely then.

Dave: Yes, I see what you mean

Dr. Green: Anyway, moving on I like the way you’ve grouped your findings into three main topic areas

Dave: Well, it became very obvious from the questionnaires that the preparation stage was really important for the whole scheme to work. So I had to look at that first. And I found a huge variation between the different institutions, as you saw.

Dr. Green: I was wondering if you could give a summary at the end of this stage of what you consider to be the best practice you found, I think that would be very helpful…

Dave: Right, I’ll just make a note of that. _Q29 What did you think of my second set of findings – on Key Skills development?  For me, this is the core of my whole project really…

Dr. Green: _Q29 And you’ve handled it very well. I wouldn’t want you to make any changes – you’ve already got a nice final focus on good practice there.

Dave: Thanks.

Dr. Green: Right, now I think the last part, which deals with the reasons why students don’t learn…

Dave: What? _Q30 The constraints on learning chapter? 

Dr. Green: Yes. that’s the one I think _Q30 you need to refer to the evidence from your research a bit more closely here. You know, maybe you could illustrate it with quotations from the questionnaires, or even use any extracts from a student ‘diary’ if you can. And refer back to what you’ve written about good practice…

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I’d also like to remind you that any tickets bought today do not include a visit to the reading rooms. I’m afraid we don’t do visits on Fridays – or any weekday during working hours, so as not to disturb the readers. But if you do want to see those rooms, _Q11 the only day there are tours is on Sundays. So, I don’t want anyone to be disappointed about that today. OK? Thank you. Right. We’ll start with a brief introduction. As many of you know, this is the United Kingdom’s National Library and you can see that this is a magnificent modern building. It was first designed by Sir Colin St John Wilson in 1977, and _Q12 inaugurated by Her Majesty the Queen more than twenty years later, in 1998.

As you can see, the size is immense and the basements alone have 300 kilometres of shelving – and that’s enough to hold about 12 million books. _Q13 The total floor space here is 100,000 square metres and, as I’ll show you, the library houses a huge range of facilities and exhibition spaces, and it has a thousand staff members based here in the building – so, you can appreciate the scale of our operation.

In fact, this was the biggest publicly-funded building constructed in the United Kingdom last century. _Q14 It is still funded by the government as a national institution, of course, and it houses one of the most important collections in the world. The different items come from every continent and span almost 3000 years.

The library isn’t a public library, though – you can’t just come in and join and borrow any of the books. _Q15 Access to the collections is limited to those involved in carrying out research, so it’s really a huge reference library for that purpose, and anyone who wants to consult any materials that are kept here can formally apply to use the library reading rooms.

Right, well, here we are, standing at the Meeting Point on the lower ground floor just to the right of the Main Entrance. I’ve given you all a plan of the building so that we can orientate ourselves and get an idea of where we’ll be going. Now outside the Main Entrance, you’ll see the wide Piazza with the stunning sculpture of Newton.

The sculptor was Paolozzi, but it’s based on the famous image by William Blake – and it’s definitely worth a closer look. _Q16  On the other side of the Piazza from the statue is the Conference Centre, which is used for all kinds of international conventions – we’ll take a quick look inside at the end of our tour.

Looking ahead of us now, you’ll see that we’re standing opposite the staircase down to the basement where you’ll find the cloakroom, _Q17 and to the left of that, we have the information desk where you can find out about any current exhibitions, the times of the tours and anything you need to know – if you don’t have a tour guide. As you can see, on this lower ground floor _Q18 we also have a bookshop – that’s the area over to the left of the main entrance. You’ll be free to browse there when we get back to the ground floor.

Now, _Q19 opposite the main entrance on this floor we have the open stairs leading up to the upper ground floor. And at the top of them, in the middle of the upper ground floor, you can see a kind of glass-sided tower that rises all the way up through the ceiling and up to the first floor. _Q19 This is called the King’s Library – it’s really the heart of the building – it was built to house the collection that was presented to the nation in 1823 by the King. You can see it from every floor above ground. When we go up there, you’ll find the library’s Treasures Gallery on the left. Can you find it on your plan? That’s the exciting one, so we’ll be visiting that first, but we’ll also  _Q20 take a look at the stamp display situated behind it, on the way to the cafe  – a lot of people miss that. The Cafeteria runs along the back of the floor and, in the right-hand corner, you’ll find the lifts and toilets… ha, always good to locate them. The other main area on that floor is the Public Access Catalogue section and I’ll show you how that operates when we get up there…

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