Becoming a proficient and confident communicator requires navigating complexity and nuance in styles attuned to diverse situations. This course cultivates these competences for everyday, university and professional settings. It also establishes a foundation to transition to the Cambridge C2 Proficiency: Preparation Workshop or to prepare independently for the Cambridge C2 Proficiency certificate.
You will work with a wide range of audio-visual materials and texts to develop a more sophisticated command of grammar and vocabulary across speaking, listening, reading, and writing tasks on current issues. Some of these transdisciplinary issues include: well-being and economics; evidence in science and law; affect and argumentation across the disciplines; storytelling and life journeys as well as persuasion in conversation and presentation.
Some of the language topics you will cover include:
- conditional forms so that you can conjecture about imaginable and improbable outcomes in the future and past;
- syntax so that you can adjust the word order to craft grammatically accurate sentences that are both elegant and clear;
- conjunctions and linking expressions so that you can connect sentences and ideas to optimise the coherence and flow in a text;
- interrogation and negation so that you can formulate precise and probing questions and forcefully yet tactfully repudiate claims;
- reported speech so that you can appropriately render the utterances of others and position yourself in relation to what they say;
- features of formal and spoken English so that you can calibrate your register in speech and writing according to the situation and your interlocutors.
The course covers selected items from units 8 to 18 in MyGrammarLab Advanced C1/C2; familiarity is assumed with the materials in the first seven units of the book as covered in the English C1 course.