IELTS

The misery for British sports fans continues. We had our best chance for years and years to have a British winner at a big tennis championship today, but it was not to be. One day!
Lots of students I know are taking IELTS. As you are probably aware, there are any number of resources to help you practice for the IELTS exam on the Internet. One site I’ve noticed a few times recently is Dominic Cole’s IELTS Blog. What I like about this site is that Dominic has a good sense of humour! He knows that IELTS can drive you mad! The important thing about preparing for an exam like IELTS is to make sure that you do lots of general language practice, and then a bit of exam practice near the exam. You need to set up a routine in which you practise your general language skills as well as learning about the exam and thinking about techniques and strategies that you can employ to maximise your marks. If I was getting ready for this exam I would definitely be visiting Dominic’s blog regularly!

Critical thinking

Critical analysis MP3

Ever seen the comment ‘be more critical’ or, ’more analysis needed’ on your work, but do not know what your tutor actually means by it?

Download this audio file, to find out how you can improve your critical analysis and thinking in your written work, and why it is just so important.

Download the transcript (PDF ~ 37K)

This content is based on Critical Thinking Skills by Stella Cottrell.

Write your own dissertation!

I have just been searching for links to put up on a page for dissertation writing and I am amazed at the number of websites there are offering to write your dissertation for you. In fact, when I google ‘dissertation writing’ the first eight results are all for companies that promise to write you a brilliant dissertation! Then comes one university site and then another host of these dodgy (yes, untrustworthy) sites which you shouldn’t even look at.  Would you buy a used car from these guys? No, and I wouldn’t trust them to write a dissertation for me either.  I couldn’t stop myself from looking at one of them just to see what they were offering – and they are offering “FREE unlimited  revesions”! I hope they will correct their own mistakes that they will be making when they do their work!

Lots of students will be now getting down to some serious work on their dissertations, and the best piece of advice I could give to students at this point is to try to understand the point of writing a dissertation. If you approach your dissertation as just another piece of work to tick off and you just want to get it over and done with as soon as possible then it is unlikely you will do well. You need to spend a while reading about dissertations. When you start to appreciate the aim of a dissertation you will be in a position to think about a topic and doing some background reading. More about dissertations soon, but meanwhile take a look at some links on this page here.

News sites in English

Over the past week I have had a number of students asking me about the best places to read the news in English online. That’s when I realised that I didn’t have a page on English for University. Com helping students to find news sites in English so – time to start one! Of course once I started to look for news sites and online newspapers to link to, I just spent hours following links and browsing around the world! You could almost say that we are spoilt with choice because of the huge number and variety of news sites available. (And yet when I watch a film on TV in the evening they still sometimes put The News in the middle of it as though if I miss that particular news programme I won’t be able to get my news from anywhere else!!) If you want to know what’s happening around the world, why not kill two birds with one stone and read the news in English so you get your information and you improve your English skills at the same time. Many people think that this unconscious language learning which takes place whilst you are actually focusing on the content of what you are reading rather than the grammar is very important to language acquisition. At the risk of reinventing the wheel here are some suggestions for getting your news in English.