Academic Vocabulary

In this post I am pointing you to a site from the University of Hong Kong (yes, another one, they have excellent English resources!) which is great for developing your subject specific vocabulary. It’s called Professional Word Web. You should follow the link and then choose the subject you want to study from the list on the left, you can choose from Business and Economics, Engineering, Law, Social Work and Idiomatic English. You will see texts which introduce target vocabulary. Then you can check the meaning of the word, its pronunciation and see it used in different contexts. There are exercises and games to reinforce the vocabulary too. This is a great resource and you should definitely make use of it. It’s here.

Students of British culture should be aware that it is time for the Wimbledon tennis championship to take over our TV sets. It is traditional for the British to get really excited about this, and start talking about the possibility of a British player winning. Of course we never do and we forget about tennis again until the following summer, which is why we don’t have any good tennis players!

Research with Intute

I have a great link to help you with your research and that is a link to Intute. Intute is, in its own words from its homepage, “a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research”. I know that English language students are often asked to find resources for projects and presentations and this can be difficult. It is usually not a good idea to use just newspaper articles or random things you find on the Internet. What you need are articles from journals which are written by academics and are peer reviewed (which means other academics read them and think they are good too). Intute is an excellent resource offering free academic journals to readers. Wow! Just try entering your search terms (do an advanced search if you need to), choose the subject area you want to trawl through, and off you go. You can also set up an account with My Intute to save all your resources that you find. Enjoy Intute here.

Academic reading

The link I have today is for students who want to keep abreast of world events (yes, that means keep up with) and improve their English at the same time. The link is to a newspaper called Newsademic. This newspaper is designed for young people and for students of English as a Foreign Language. If you are an advanced, mature overseas student then you might find this is not appropriate for you, it might be too simple. But there are many overseas students who will benefit from it. Please take a look. The link takes you to a page which has archived copies in British English. It’s here.

Academic Listening

When I drive to work I often listen to BBC Radio 4 in the car. Again and again I am struck by what a great resource this is for students. At the moment there is a fascinating series of lectures on China being broadcast in a series called ‘The Reith Lectures’. Every year the BBC invites leading figures to give a series of lectures on radio and these lectures are called ‘The Reith Lectures’ in honour of Sir John Reith, the first director-general of the BBC. I have mentioned this resource before because the BBC holds archives of these lectures which you can listen to online, and they have the transcript too!

This year’s lectures are about China, its history and its relationship with the west. I have a lot of Chinese students and I have found this year’s lectures riveting. (New word? Don’t rush for your dictionaries – try to guess the meaning from the context. If you guessed very interesting then you are correct!) I am going to show you the link to the page for this year’s series of Reith lectures where you can listen to these lectures. If you are Chinese and wanting to improve your listening skills then there is no excuse for not listening to these lectures – don’t you want to know what westerners are saying about you?! The only thing about this page is that you cannot open the transcript and listen to the lecture at the same time – so listen first, then read if you need to, then listen again. If you want to read and listen at the same time then you’ll have to copy and paste the transcript into a word document which you can look at as you listen. Here’s the link to the Reith lectures on the BBC.