This course builds the essential foundations to advance you towards becoming an independent user of English so that you can communicate on familiar everyday and academic topics. You will expand your vocabulary, phrases, and grammar necessary for simple and short oral and written interactions. You will practice and improve your speaking (dialogue and presentation), listening (short audio and video conversations and talks), reading (short texts on familiar and academic topics), and writing (short descriptive texts).
Some of the language topics that will be covered are:
- Present simple and present continuous tenses to talk about routines, current activities, and to ask and answer questions about everyday life (How often do you relax?; What are you working on this semester?).
- Past simple and past continuous tenses to describe completed events as well as ongoing activities in the past (She moved to Singapore five years ago.; This morning at 3 a.m. I was still sleeping.).
- Present perfect to talk about finished events in the past (I have eaten falafel, but I have never made it myself.).
- The future with going to to describe intentions and the present continuous to talk about fixed plans (When they finish the project, they are going to take time off.; We have tickets, we are flying to Dublin tomorrow.).
- Modal verbs to express ability and polite requests (He can analyse graphs, but he cannot create them with AI.; May we have more time, please?).
- Adjectives and adverbs to describe and evaluate and to compare and contrast (The data on the disease is valuable; however, reliable doctors are more urgent now.).
- You will apply these language topics to issues such as people and populations; social trends; scientific achievements and discoveries; health and nutrition; figures, data, and graphs as well as geography and urban spaces.
This small-group course is capped at ten participants to facilitate intensive learning.