Academic English skills for international students
One of the biggest problems that overseas students face at university is in lectures. Why do the lecturers speak so quickly?! Why do they jump about all over the place, why don’t they carefully follow the points on the slide? Well, lecturers are humans (I think!) and they get distracted, they suddenly think about things … Read more
I said a few things in my last post about essay marking criteria. Each institution uses different marking criteria, but generally speaking it is quite unusual to get much more than 70% for a piece of work at a British university. This often worries students as they may be used to getting much higher marks. … Read more
What devices? Linking devices! These are things that your teachers go on and on about all the time! These are the expressions like furthermore, however, on top of that and all those other words that your teacher gets you to underline in class all the time. Why is your teacher obsessed about these things? Because … Read more
What a question! Last week someone came to see me, “Patrick, my writing is terrible,” he said to me, “what can I do?” Unfortunately he had not brought any work with him. I sent him away and asked him to write something and bring it to me. Then we would have something to work with. … Read more