All pre-sessional classes take place at the Language Centre, and are broken into two broad course components, which will be taught by different tutors. These are:
Written Communication
This segment of the pre-sessional course covers all aspects of written language production and comprehension. This can be broadly broken into three core skills:
Academic Reading
These lessons are aimed at helping students read with increased efficiency and speed, while enabling them to cope with problems encountered during reading. The following areas are covered:
- A review of reading strategies
- Faster reading
- Note taking and summarising
- Sources of difficulty (e.g. vocabulary, grammar, reference, cohesion)
- Coping with sentence length
- Recognising different discourse structures
- Identifying the writer’s stance as well as the purpose of the text (i.e. reading ‘between the lines’)
Academic Writing
In this module, a comprehensive review of the foundations of academic writing is provided. Although some writing will be done in class, students are expected to complete a number of writing tasks at home. This module will cover:
- The ‘English’ essay
- Organisation and structure
- Conventions of graduate writing
- The writing process (including planning a longer research project)
- Editing and reformulating
- Cohesion
Language Study
This covers grammatical aspects of language that pose difficulty for non-native writers. The focus is placed on reviewing English syntax with a view to increasing your technical knowledge of English and, in so doing, improving your written work. The following areas are covered:
- Sentence types
- Linking language
- Demarcation and Punctuation
- Citation Conventions
Spoken Communication
This segment of the pre-sessional course covers all aspects of spoken language. This can be broadly broken into three core skills:
Academic Listening
Although some listening to social, informal English is included in these lessons, the main objective is to prepare students to deal with lectures, seminars and tutorials. The module therefore covers:
- Prediction and inference
- Recognising intonation
- Recognising reduced forms
- Listening for ‘gist’, as well as for detail
- From listening to note-taking
- Recognition of lecturing devices (such as recycling, reformulating, exemplifying, explaining, expanding and summarising)
Academic Speaking and Presentation Skills
During the pre-sessional, students will be asked to take part in: individual/group presentations, seminars, debates, panel and group discussions. In particular, you will be expected to give two presentations (one pair/group presentation and one solo presentation in your own discipline).
This module therefore covers:
- Preparing and giving presentations
- ‘Holding the floor’
- Role of the audience (e.g. questioning speakers in an appropriate manner)
- Question and answer techniques
- Appropriate use of lexis
- Awareness of register
Communication and Pronunciation
The main emphasis of the ‘communication’ lessons is on encouraging fluency. This can include any form of oral work (appropriate responses, vocabulary development in context) or focus on simulations and social English. The dedicated ‘pronunciation’ lessons are intended to help students improve stress, intonation etc.
These lessons cover:
- Question and answer techniques
- Interrupting
- Returning to the topic
- Expressing opinions
- Collocations and idioms
- Complete and partial agreement
- Disagreement
