English for Academic Purposes (7-9 February 2018)

Led by: Dr Karin Whiteside/University of Reading, David Read/University of Sheffield and Dr Sarah Brewer/University of Reading.

A ‘task-based’ approach was taken across all three days – participants were always given preparation time for tasks during which tutors circulated and fed in needed vocabulary and helped with grammar/vocabulary issues, and there were also regular follow up/error correction sessions after tasks were completed.  

February 7^th

Aims

• To develop participant’s spoken language skills for giving opinions, agreeing and disagreeing & collaborative decision-making
• To develop participants’ understanding of organisation at paragraph level and at lexico-grammatical (sentence & inter-sentence level) in a model text:
  • Paragraphing/overall structure
  • Language for cohesion – signalling words/phrases
  • Language for cohesion – referencing language
• Grammatical work on linking words

February 8th

Aims

• To provide revision/further practice of giving opinions/agreeing & disagreeing
• To develop participants listening and speaking skills around a real-world research topic (human-elephant conflict and the beehive fence project)
• To develop participants writing skills via a form-focused ‘dictogloss’ activity
• Grammatical work on the language of cause and effect (specifically for written academic contexts)

February 9th

Aims

• To provide revision/further practice of giving opinions/agreeing & disagreeing
• To teach participants the CARS (Creating A Research Space) model for introducing research using a simple model
• To support participants’ development of a 50-word summary of their research idea (through a staged process: brainstorming in Arabic, writing a log version following the CARS model, then writing a shorter version).