Rate My Professor Chantelle Leach

Since 2020, Chantelle Leach has coordinated the SUCCESS English Support Program (ESP), a faculty-embedded initiative co-designed by an Academic Language and Literacy specialist in partnership with discipline academics. Grounded in Transition Pedagogy, the program targets increasingly diverse first-year cohorts across Humanities and Health Sciences, particularly students from low-SES, first-in-family, and English as an Additional Language backgrounds. Workshops address critical skills including referencing, paraphrasing, source use, text structure, and critical evaluation, which students identify as barriers to engagement. Empirical evidence from a mixed-methods evaluation—including student interviews, grade trajectories, pre- and post-writing analyses, and language error assessments—shows measurable gains in grammar, vocabulary, and academic literacy conventions, alongside reductions in anxiety and enhancements in confidence, academic integrity, equity, and sense of belonging. Outcomes varied by discipline, with strong alignment in Humanities and identified gaps in Health Sciences prompting refinements. Leach has presented her work at conferences such as the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (AALL) on 'Scaffolding Success: What the Data Shows About Discipline-Embedded Language Support,' the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) 2024 Postgraduate Day session on presentation skills, and Curtin University's Thesis Fest 2021 with 'How to finish your PhD … based on wisdom from 80s rock ballads.'