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The Importnace Of English For Academic Purposes For Pre-universtiy Students

This Paper Discusses the Four Academic Factors in Academic English Study

Date : 7/6/2016 4

Author Information

Ahmed

Uploaded by : Ahmed
Uploaded on : 7/6/2016 4
Subject : English

What is English for

Academic Purposes and why is it important to students who are planning to continue their studies at a university?

This English for Academic Purposes Bridging Program is written for pre-university students and it contains study materials and test exercises for the following modules.

Module #1: Critical Reading and Research Methodology

Module #2: Academic WritingModule #3: Critical Listening

Module #4: Individual Verbal Presentations and Group Discussions

English for Academic Purposes

CAN YOU ANSWER THIS QUESTION? HOW GOOD ARE YOUR ACADEMIC ENGLSIH LANGUATE SKILLS? If you want to attend a university to continue your education, this is what you need to know.

Assessing the Student's English for Academic Purposes Ability.

If the university admissions department considers that a student`s Academic English skills are inadequate the student will be required to take and pass an Academic English Course before they are accepted by a faculty. If a non-native English speaking student is considering applying to an English speaking university and has an IELTS score that is less than 5.5 or 6.0, (depending upon the area of study), the student will be required to demonstrate to the university that they have undertaken studies to substantially improve their Academic English Skills before they are accepted by any faculty of that university. An option is for the applicant to enroll in an on-line self-study, part time or a full EAP course before they start their main educational program. The purpose of the EAP program is to prepare students to cope with the high demands of English language and academically related study-skill that will be required of them. If applicants to an English speaking university do not have adequate levels of Academic English, they will be required to undertake and pass advanced EAP studies and examinations in the areas of:

(1) Critical Reading and Research

(2) Academic Writing

(3) Critical Listening and Note Taking

(4) Individual Verbal Presentation and Group Seminar Discussions

Module #1: Critical Reading and Research

When you study at a university you will have huge amounts of reading to do for each course so you must to be able to read efficiently and quickly to find important information. You must develop effective reading strategies such as scanning and skimming to determine what information is important and what isn't, and you will need to improve your English vocabulary because there will be many words that you will not know the meaning of. Learning about how reading texts are structured can help you learn to read more efficiently.

This course will teach you how to:

(1) Understand the meaning of unfamiliar words and word groups& relations within the sentence/complex and conceptual meaning, such as comparison, purpose, cause, effect.

Reading to Write

For students involved with advanced academic studies, your reading will be strongly connected to your writing and most of what you write will be linked to what you read.

This course will teach you how to:

(1) Make notes on what you read&

(2) Cite what you readlt;/b>

(3) Comment on and evaluate what you readlt;/b>

(4) Compare what you readlt;/b>

(5) Use what you read to support your own writinglt;/b>

(6) Differentiate your views from those of the texts you read

(7) Recognizing unsupported claims and claims supported by evidence - fact from opinion& extracting important points to summarize& following an argument& reading critically/evaluating the text.

In university, writing is required to complete assignment, essays or exam question. Foreign students often do worse than they should in examinations or in written assignments in English, because they have not fully understood what they have been asked to do. To score higher marks in an examination or an assignment, it is important to fully understand what a question means and how it should be answered. In order to understand what must be done you must analyze the questions and knowing and applying the academic writing frame is essential.

Module #2: Academic Writing.

Before you start writing, analyze the question. DO NOT INTERPRATE THE QUESTION. Write about what you are asked to do, not what you think you are asked to do. To analyze the title, it is useful to follow the following steps:

This course will teach you how to:

(1) Identify the topic.

(2) Understand the instruction and decide what they mean and what you are required to do.

(3) Check whether there is a viewpoint and if so, is it the same as yours.

Doing the Research

When you understand the question and know what you are expected to write, you will need to do some reading to find out what has been published in that area of study. You will not find the information you need about your topic in one section of the library. You need to think and look as widely as you can about possible subject areas that may be relevant to your topic. Most of the writing that you do will be several paragraphs long and written about one topic and the aim of your writing must strictly focus on the wording of the title or question, and this must be defined at the beginning of your writing. The main idea of academic writing is for you to say something for yourself using the ideas of the subject, and for you to present ideas that you have learned from your research. The emphasis should be on working with other people's ideas, rather than simply copying their words because this is the academic offence of PLAGARISM so the ideas and people that you refer to in your writing need to be acknowledged by a system of referencing. Your work should have the following main sections: All academic writing MUST have the following sections and be shown in this specific order.

This course will teach you how to develop and write the:

(1) Preliminaries - Title page, Table of Contents, Abstract

(2) Main text & Introduction, body and conclusion

(3) References and Citations

University students are asked to write many different kinds of texts, depending on your subject so in order to answer the question you need to be able to write texts to do the following:

This course will teach you how to:

(1) Define the question

(2) Give an example

(3) Explain why

(4) Support your explanation with evidence

(5) Describe a solution

(6) Describe advantages and disadvantages

(7) Choose

(8) Explain why

Module #3: Critical Listening Note-Taking

Most non-native English speaking students are very worried about their listening skills. Academic listening involves trying to follow a lecture or discussion in English while writing adequate notes on what you are listening to at the same time. If you have difficulties in doing this, you may not be sure whether your problems are listening problems or language problems. Listening to lectures or seminars is essential and there is a need for you to be aware of the way lectures are organized, the kind of language that is used in lectures and making sure you know the language, particularly the pronunciation of words in your own subject. The most important skill is for you to learn to recognize the structure of lectures - the main points and subsidiary points.

This course will teach you how to:

(1) Take notes.

(2) Recognizing lecture structure: understanding relationships in the lecture - reference& understanding relations within the sentence/complex sentences& importance markers, signposts

(3) Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words and word groups - guessing.

(4) Recognizing implications: information not explicitly stated& recognizing the speaker`s attitude. Evaluating the importance of information - selecting information.

(5) Understanding intonation, voice emphasis

(6) Listening skills: skimming - listening to obtain gist& scanning - listening to obtain specific information& selective extraction of relevant points to summarize text& learning various ways of making sense of the words you hear.

Summarizing and Note-Taking

The way you listen to something will depend on your purpose. You listen to different texts in different ways. Listening is an interactive and a two-way process. As a listener you cannot be passive, you must be an active listener. This means you have to work at constructing the meaning from the words you hear. You construct the meaning using your knowledge of the language, your subject and the world, continually predicting and assessing. You need to be active all the time when you are listening. It is useful to formulate questions based on the information you have. Title, sub-titles and section heading can help you formulate question to keep you interacting.I

It is not enough just to understand the important information in each sentence. It is also necessary to understand how the sentences are related to each other. Every text has a structure& it is not just a random collection of sentences. The parts that make up the text are related in a meaningful way to each other. Recognizing the way in which a text is organized will help you to understand it better. In order to understand the text, it is necessary to understand how the sentences are related. Words like "it", "this", "that", "here", "there" etc. refer to other parts of the text and it is necessary to understand these connections

Module #4: . Speaking in Academic Contexts Speaking in academic contexts is becoming increasingly important because you will be involved in individual projects and group work speaking and group projects. Students in Higher Education will be involved in collaborative work so it is very important that you are more aware of what is involved in individual verbal presentations, seminar or group activity and to learn some of the interactional language that is used there. It is important to practice making verbal presentations and taking part in group discussions on academic topics.

This course will teach you and explain:

(1) The purpose of seminars.

(2) How to make a presentation: the structure of presentations, making and using notes to speak from. Introducing the topic and giving the information in detail sequencing, describing similarities and differences comparing and contrasting illustrating a point - giving examples and referring to research emphasizing a point summarizing and concluding. (

3) Controlling the discussion: leading the discussion changing the subject

(4) Participating in the discussion: interrupting politely asking questions - asking for more information/clarification stating a point of view - supporting your view agreeing and disagreeing - challenging and commenting making suggestions checking - making sure that you have understood holding the floor - preventing interruptions.

(5) Listening and note taking.

Presenting in seminars is the same as with writing, you must plan your talk. Written language is different from spoken language so if you just read your essay, no one will understand you or be interested in what you have to say.

This course will teach you and explain how to:

(1) Concentrate only on the main points. Ignore details. Hammer home the essence of your argument. If necessary find ways of making your basic points so that your audience will be clear about what they are.

2) Make your presentation lively and interesting. This does not mean telling jokes but if you can think of interesting or amusing examples to illustrate your argument, use them

(3) How to write out everything you have to say, including examples etc. Rehearse what you are going to say until you are happy

(4) When you know exactly what you are going to say, how to reduce it to outline notes. How to rehearse your talk again, this time from the outline notes. Make sure you can find your way easily from the outline notes to the full notes, in case you forget something.


This resource was uploaded by: Ahmed