All Language Centre courses

In-Sessional English Conversation Hours

For the last workshop of term, we will be preparing doctoral students for life after their first-year reports, as they begin to think about putting their full thesis together. Strategies suggested in this class should be transferable for any students writing a longer piece of work.

This session covers the basic principles of academic style. Learn how to make your writing more formal, persuasive, and precise, and how to use the passive voice and tentative language (hedging) to good effect.

This workshop discusses the basic principles of academic style, helping you to write more formally, persuasively and precisely. Learn how to attain clarity and accuracy and how to use the passive voice and tentative language (hedging). Students will apply their learning to practical examples.

Across disciplines, academic writing uses a repertoire of patterns of language to organise and create fluent and coherent texts. Evidence from large databases (corpora) of academic writing shows us how grammar and vocabulary follow regular patterns to create fluent information focus.

We continue to work with patterns and chunks in writing, based on academic corpus database statistics. We look at patterns of language used after nouns in ways typical of academic writing, and how chunks are used to link ideas and arguments in a fluent way. This is a practical workshop with tasks to complete before and during the Zoom workshop.

Making the distinction between when to use the infinitive form of the verb (‘to run’) and the gerund (‘running’) is difficult for non-native speakers. This workshop will identify some general rules and some avoidable pitfalls.

There is nothing to do before the workshop.

The correct use of articles (the / a / an) is one of the trickiest aspects of English grammar for non-native speakers, whether their language uses articles in a different way from English or maybe manages to get by without any articles at all. This webinar will set out clearly the ways in which English uses articles, and will hopefully offer some conceptual keys to help students correct their own usage. Students will then be asked to complete some exercises online.

The correct use of articles (the / a / an) is one of the trickiest aspects of English grammar for non-native speakers, whether their language uses articles in a different way from English or maybe manages to get by without any articles at all. This webinar will set out clearly the ways in which English uses articles, and will hopefully offer some conceptual keys to help students correct their own usage.

The most significant grammar mistakes that foreign students make are usually those that greatly change the meaning of the sentence. Modals, such as can or would, are often used to indicate the position of the writer in academic writing, so their inaccurate use can easily give a very different meaning from that intended. For this workshop, students will first watch a video and complete some exercises on Moodle. In the real-time webinar, students can ask questions and discuss areas of difficulty.