It’s been a while since I have written a post and today there is a really good reason for writing one because there is an excellent Academic English website which has come online from Queen Mary, University of London, and it’s open to everyone! I’ve been taking a look around the site and it is definitely going to feature on my short list of great sites to use and to recommend to students. One of the pages that I’m particularly impressed by is the one which focuses on seminar speaking skills.  Participating in seminars is one area of university study that international students find particularly challenging for a number of reasons and this page highlights useful language that students can use to perform a range of important functions, such as disagreeing politely and giving an opinion.  The good thing about the Queen Mary site is that it doesn’t just list the phrases for you. Instead there are interactive exercises  in which you have to listen and identify the function of the phrases so there is a good chance that you’ll remember the phrases and you can use them in your own seminars. Visit Academic English Online from Queen Mary here.

I know what you are thinking: a post from English for University. Com! That’s unusual! Yes, things have been pretty hectic recently meaning that I haven’t been posting much over the past few weeks. Well, now that I have nearly finished marking a very large pile of reports from the end of last term I promise to write more.

As I was marking, I couldn’t help noticing that lots of students seem to think that they can take two basic sentences and join them together with a comma. Take a look:

Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK     +      the owners of Heathrow want to build a third runway to expand its capactiy.

=

Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK, its owners want to build a third runway to expand its capacity.

Sorry guys, no can do!

You have to do more work than that! The sentence above is incorrect! (As I said here a little while ago.)

You can write:

Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK. Its owners…

Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK and its owners…

The easiest way to do it  is:

Heathrow airport is the biggest airport in the UK; its owners want to build a third runway to expand its capacity.

Then you can impress your reader with the correct use of a semicolon which I bet your teachers don’t see very often! Here’s a fun page about joining sentences with a semicolon (because let’s be honest, it’s pretty dry stuff!): http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

In this post I’m going to just mention ONE thing about presentations, and that is the idea of AUTHENTICITY. ‘Authentic’ is an interesting word which means lots of things in different contexts. It has the general meaning of TRUE, REAL. The worst thing that a student can do in a presentation is present information to the audience that everybody already knows. What is the point? There is no point. So when I tell my students that their presentation has to be AUTHENTIC I mean that it has to be original and include their own ideas.

Once you have started to think about how you can make your presentation ORIGINAL and AUTHENTIC then you can start to think about other things such as language and structure. One of my favourite video resources on presentations which I often direct students to  is on the LLAS website  and you can watch it and learn about how to structure an academic presentation here.

This is an extract from a real report about the impact that international students have on the economy of London. Just think about that for a moment. What do you think the effect of all those international students living and studying in London is on the city? (Yes, now you can start to imagine why businesses and universities are so angry with the government for making it harder for students to come into the UK!) Now look at this extract from the report:

1.1. The brief

London Higher commissioned Oxford Economics to undertake an analysis of the contribution international students make to London’s economy. The key areas to be included in the quantification of this
contribution are:

• 
  Fees
• 
  Subsistence
• 
  Family visits while studying in London.

In addition, Oxford Economics were requested to calculate the economic contribution of the sub-set of students from:

• 
  Mainland China, India and USA.

1.2. Report structure
The remainder of the report is structured as follows:

• 
  The remainder of this chapter provides background information about international students studying in London.
• 
  Chapter 2 outlines the economic contribution of London’s international students to the UK economy.
• 
  Chapter 3 provides information on the number of international students who are sponsored by their employer along with estimates for the proportion of international students who remain in London after completing their studies.

Oxford Economics (2007) The economic impact of London’s international students

Available: http://www.londonhigher.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/OxfordEconomicsReport.pdf

It’s a real document and it is a perfect example of how to introduce a report. After reading the introduction the reader knows what the report is about and the structure of the report.

Follow the link to look at the rest of the report: short easy to read sentences!

The first method is to read your piece of work checking only for ONE particular type of mistake each time. You should know what type of mistakes that you most commonly make – for example subject-verb agreement mistakes, mistakes with articles, singular/plural mistakes, mistakes with tenses. Decide which type of mistake to check for first (eg subject-verb agreement) and then read through the essay checking for ONLY this type of mistake. If you are doing subject-verb agreement start with the first sentence and find the subject. Is it singular or plural? Countable or uncountable? Now find the verb that goes with this subject – is it in the right form to go with the subject? Go on to the next sentence and do the same, and so on through the piece of work. When you have done that you choose the next type of mistake, maybe articles, and you go through the piece of work checking just for article mistakes. Then you do it again with the next type of mistake and so on. Just to help you with this method, let me suggest the type of errors you look for:

ARTICLES (A/THE)
SINGULAR/PLURAL
TENSE
SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT
ACTIVE / PASSIVE SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION
WORD FORM (NOUN/ADJECTIVE/ADVERB/VERB)
VERB FORM

Phew. That may take some time but your work will benefit from it. What you are trying to achieve is objectivity when you look at your work. The problem is that you have been so involved in it that you cannot see it with new eyes. So my second method is to suggestion is that you check your work by reading it backwards. Sounds rather odd! What I mean is that you look at the final sentence first. You begin at the start of the final sentence and read it checking for mistakes. Then you move back to the next sentence and check that one, and then the one before that. The reason for doing this is that when you do this you take the meaning out of the sentence and you check it just for its grammatical form. When you read from start to finish you are focused on meaning, and it is really difficult to try and ignore the meaning and focus just on the grammar.

Try putting these two suggestions together!

How do I reference from a blog?
How do I reference from a speech?

Well, the most important thing is that you give as much information about the source as you can so that other people can find the source if they want to! New forms of communication are constantly being developed – eg twitter. Nobody sits down and makes a new rule about how to reference from twitter so you need to take the old rule and adapt it slightly to make it fit the new technology.

Take a look at this page from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge which has a great resource on referencing Harvard style here.

Here’s a paragraph that we were looking at the other day in class taken from an example report about the possibility of building a new motorway along the south coast of England:

One of the main advantages of building a new motorway in the south of England is that the traffic would be diverted away from the small towns and villages and onto the new motorway. According to Smith (2011), the A303, A35 and A354 have all seen large increases in their traffic flow over the previous ten years. Much research has been done into the effects of heavy traffic on communities it goes through. Jones (2010) believes that increased traffic in small towns leads to a higher incidence of chest complaints in older people and young children. There is also concern about the number of traffic accidents involving school children who live in towns on the A35 (The Western Morning News, 2010). It seems that building a new motorway could improve the quality of life for many communities living in the area. However, this benefit needs to be balanced against the cost of the new road.

I think this is a good paragraph and its structure is quite straightforward. I hope you can see:

Part One: A topic sentence giving a clear argument which tells the reader about the topic of the sentence:

One of the main advantages of building a new motorway in the south of England is that the traffic would be diverted away from the small towns and villages and onto the new motorway.

Part Two: Support for the topic sentence using evidence from sources:

According to Smith (2011), the A303, A35 and A354 have all seen large increases in their traffic flow over the previous ten years. Much research has been done into the effects of heavy traffic on communities it goes through. Jones (2010) believes that increased traffic in small towns leads to a higher incidence of chest complaints in older people and young children. There is also concern about the number of traffic accidents involving school children who live in towns on the A35 (The Western Morning News, 2010).

Part Three: Conclusion/Discussion which comprises some thoughts from the writer:

It seems that building a new motorway could improve the quality of life for many communities living in the area. However, this benefit needs to be balanced against the cost of the new road.

I like this page from the Writing Den which explains it even more clearly than I do: it’s here.

Dogs chase cats
The dogs chase the cats
The dogs will be chasing the cats

all take the same amount of time to say. This means that many words have strong forms (when they are important and stressed) and weak forms (when they are not important and squeezed into the rest of the sentence).

I think the awareness of this is really important because then students can start to get away from the staccato pronunciation that impedes communication. The first step is to understand the nature of this feature of English and you can do that by taking a look at a couple of youtube clips which explain it well. Xansworld and Rachel’s English. Com have some nice short explanations which make it clear. Thanks to youtube again!

Before the lecture students need to prepare! If you just turn up to the lecture not knowing what the lecturer is going to talk about then you are not helping yourself. You need to find out as much as possible about the lecture as you can before you attend it. Are the powerpoint slides available to view beforehand? Do you know the vocabulary for the subject? Can you read the relevant parts of the textbook before the lecture?

During the lecture you need to be active! Sit at the front so you can hear properly and so you can pick up all the facial expressions and mumbles and off-hand comments from your lecturer. Use an audio recorder if you can. Try to judge what is important and what is not important. Note down things that you can’t understand to ask the lecturer later.

After the lecture form a study group with your friends. Sit down together and swap notes. Talk about what you understood and what you didn’t understand. Find time to ask the lecturer about things you are not sure about. Write up your notes in longer hand so that you can understand them later.

I would strongly recommend students to work through the Listening to Lectures part of that great resource Prepare for Success which you can find here.