Improving your academic vocabulary

Isn’t the Olympics just great? I have nearly been late for class because I’ve been enjoying Olympic breakfasts and can’t drag myself away to drive to work. However, when I get to class I am helping students to improve their academic vocabulary, and one way you can do that is by doing some exercises on words taken from the Academic Word List. If you don’t know what the Academic Word List is then you’ve got some reading to do through some of my other posts on Academic Vocabulary! Today I am pointing you towards some exercises designed by Gerry Luton from the University of Victoria in Canada. This is one of those resources that I can hardly believe is available for free on the Internet. The AWL is divided into 10 sublists and Gerry has written exercises for each of those sublists. Read Gerry’s instructions and do these exercises here.

Surviving your summer school

I hope that overseas students on summer schools are surviving their experiences! If you are doing a pre-sessional course at a university then you should take advantage of this opportunity to settle in and find your way around. Some general words of advice to help you complete your course successfully:
1. Hand in your work on time. Teachers hate it when students hand in work late! If you do this, you are more likely to get a lower mark because there will be less time to revise it and you will lose the sympathy of your teacher. Weaker students often hand in work late because they find the work hard and need more time to do it but when this happens they often miss chances to improve their work, meaning they don’t get any better! It’s a vicious circle (which means the problem goes round and round getting worse and worse). Even if you think your work is not a high standard hand it in on time so you can get feedback on it and improve on it. Your pre-sessional course is a chance for you to learn about the university systems for handing in work and it is your chance to start good habits.
2. Go to your classes. Obvious really, but there are students who drift in late, missing the occasional morning or afternoon. Your teachers put in a lot of thought in planning and teaching your classes and you are putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don’t attend every session.
3. Ask for help! Do not suffer in silence! You have paid for your course and you are going to pay good money for your degree programme. Make sure you get your money’s worth by asking for help when you need it. Your teachers will probably be overworked, but they mean well and they will do their best to help you! I have never met an English language teacher who doesn’t care about their students (why else would they be there? It’s not for the money!!).
4. Work through the ‘Prepare for Success’ university orientation materials produced by the University of Southampton. I have only had a chance to look at the first of the videos here, but what I’ve seen so far is excellent. There are students from Japan and China talking about the differences in education in the West, and there are university staff talking too about cultural differences in education systems. This great material can be found here.
5. Sign up to receive my posts by e mail so you can follow my links to free Internet resources for improving your Academic English! You can see the subscription form at the top right of the page and of course you will only receive posts from this blog and you will not be spammed!
Good luck!

Using a corpus

Welcome to all the subscribers coming on board! You can subscribe really easily to these posts by e mail so you will get them direct to your inbox. Of course you will only receive posts from me and you will not be spammed!

Before you use a new word in English you should check it out! Take a look at how this word is used by British people before you use it yourself. How do you do this? You look the word up in a corpus. A corpus is a collection of language. Researchers collect a lot of language from newspapers, books, TV, radio etc and put it all into a computer. It is then possible to type a word into the computer and find all the examples of that word. This is a great way to find out if that word is really what you want. Follow today’s link to the British National Corpus which is a collection of 100 million words from spoken and written British English. In the second paragraph of the home page you will see a box where it says ’search the corpus’. This is where you type in your new word and then press enter. You will see 50 randomly selected uses of your word. Read the sentences carefully – you should see the word being used in a variety of different ways. Looking up words like this in a corpus will really help you understand how words are used. The link to the British National Corpus is here.