Pre-sessional classes usually 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 long sentences
- 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 in order to increase your technical knowledge of English and, in so doing, improve your written work. The following areas are covered:
- Sentence types
- Linking language
- Demarcation and Punctuation
- Citation Conventions
The Spoken Communication course is mainly designed to help you gain confidence and competence in speaking and listening in different academic contexts. The approach divides the Spoken Communication Course into three core components:
Academic Listening
Although some listening to social and 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
- Transitioning from listening to note-taking
- Recognition of lecturing devices (such as recycling, reformulating, exemplifying, explaining, expanding and summarising).
Academic Speaking Skills
The main emphasis of this module is for students to develop their spoken skills in a number of areas necessary for advanced university study. It covers:
- Discussing disciplines and research
- Managing group work
- Strategies for group discussion
- Arguing a case
- Summarising and discussing articles
- Speaking with academic tutors/ supervisors
- Joining in informal conversation
- Expressing and discussing your stance
- Speaking personally: expressing your stance
- Confidence and speaking
Academic Presentation Skills
During the Pre-sessional, students will be asked to take part in individual and group presentations. 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
