MrTim Birkett

Tim is a teacher of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in Imperial’s Centre for Academic English (CfAE). He is currently engaged in teaching, coordination, and development across CfAE’s wide range of academic STEMM communication services.

He is a coordinator on CfAE's 6-week summer pre-sessional programme and has taught on both the 3-Week and 6-Week pre-sessional courses. He is extensively involved as a coach in the Academic Writing 1 and Academic Writing 2 courses, providing oral feedback and guidance on written academic STEMM communication to doctoral candidates, as well as providing targeted advice and feedback for postgraduate and undergraduate students across Imperial in the centre’s Online 1:1 sessions. He has delivered regular live speaking sessions, at which students of all levels of study have the opportunity to practise and sharpen their academic spoken skills. Tim has helped develop a number of CfAE’s tailored commissioned workshops, and delivers them to undergraduate and Masters’ students in departments across the university.

Tim has a particularly strong background in examination and assessment, and as a result is part of several CfAE assessment projects in collaboration with departments around Imperial. These projects involve developing and conducting bespoke assessments to promote the learning and development of undergraduate skills in particular areas of written academic STEMM communication. These projects have also prompted the development of innovative ‘feedforward’ techniques to encourage alignment with assessment for learning principles and greater student engagement with feedback. He further works with Imperial’s Doctoral Academic Communication Requirement (DACR) and 6-Week Pre-sessional teams to assist with the development and administration of their assessments.

Before joining Imperial in 2023, Tim had worked in Hong Kong since 2006. He spent 14 years there teaching in Higher Education, working at the Language Centre of the City University of Hong Kong as an EAP teacher, manager, and Assessment Coordinator. For over a decade he worked concurrently with the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) as an examination setter and then Chief Examiner. Resulting from these roles, he sat on a number of college and territory-wide committees.

Tim holds Distinctions in the Cambridge Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (DELTA), in the International Diploma in Language Teaching Management (IDLTM), and in the Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong. His scholarship/research interests are in assessment, assessment security, feedback, and academic management, and he is a reviewer for the Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics (AJAL).

Publications

Birkett, T. M. (2020), Fairness, Justice, and Language Assessment: McNamara, Tim, Knoch, Ute, and Fan, Jason. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vii +215. TESOL Quarterly. 54(4): 1153-1154. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.606

Birkett, T. M. (2014), An investigation into EAP teacher and student perceptions and interpretations of an academic marking rubric. Master’s Thesis. The University of Hong Kong http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/208031   (Published by The HKU Scholars Hub)