Foregrounding the productive skills, "English: Speaking and Writing" is a suite of two courses enabling learners from different academic backgrounds to gain accuracy, range, confidence and fluency in written and spoken English, primarily for study purposes.
Drawing on a broad spectrum of academically oriented source material, "Speaking and Writing II" aims to engage your interest in a variety of contexts which will allow you to hone your productive skills. During the course you will work in pairs and groups, discussing source material, analysing and practising targeted language features, thereby enabling you to produce a succession of short texts. Following on from "Speaking and Writing I", this course builds on the previous course by extending the range and complexity of the areas addressed, including among others: identifying and applying academic formality; expressing points of view; describing change; situating and outlining a process; comparing and contrasting; exploring cause and effect relationships; describing data; defining and classifying; weighing the sides of an argument; reporting what others say; making a presentation.
The course gives you the opportunity to:
- compose a short series of task-focused written assignments which allow you to bring general, as well as your own research perspectives into play,
- participate in pair and group discussions which encourage you to reflect on your own and others' research experience,
- practise your pronunciation,
- improve your language control,
- learn and use academic vocabulary,
- exercise scope in your grammatical and lexical choices,
- develop aspects of coherence and cohesion: paragraphing, punctuation, linking,
- prepare and give a short presentation to your peers.
Participants needing more grammar training can also attend the course English C1 or English C1/C2 during the semester.