Resources
The resources recommended below are all free, accurate, widely used and helpful in developing the language and skills you need to operate more effectively in English.
English for General Academic Purposes
English for General Academic Purposes contains a comprehensive set of interactive learning materials for developing the language skills of
faculty at AKU to teach and work more effectively in English
This resource contains over 70 self-study items for you to complete in the order that best suits your needs. The content is divided into writing, speaking, grammar and vocabulary topics. Each topic includes learning materials relevant to aspects of professional academic work and teaching in English, for example:
-
describing and summarising trends and data clearly
- useful language for presentations
- speaking without hesitating
- clarifying information (simplifying, rephrasing)
- accuracy in grammar and vocabulary
If you are interested in using this resource to develop your English language skills for academic and professional use, contact us at ele.net@aku.edu
.
Web based resources
Reading and Writing
The Academic Phrasebank provides a comprehensive bank of useful phrases used in academic writing, organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation.
The British Council Writing for a Purpose academic writing resources and vocabulary exercises have a large number of activities for advanced learners. Although the materials are based on a corpus of
high quality student texts, much of the content is also relevant to faculty.
Professor Word is a free,
browser-based reading tool which lets you click on any word in a website to get the definition. When you print out the page, all the words and definitions you clicked will be included as footnotes.
Speaking and listening
English for International
Conferences
is a video-based set of interactive
resouces which focus on the important language you need when you present a paper at a conference. There are also materials on developing the language and skills to perform well in the Q&A.
Signal Phrases for Class provides useful expressions to help your students follow what you are talking about in lectures.
TED Talks,
OU podcasts and
University of
R eading Lectures provide extensive listening practice on a range of academic topics and provide a model of language use for your own lectures and presentations.
Grammar and vocabulary
A corpus is a collection written and spoken texts that you can use to see how academic vocabulary is used in context and what words typically come before and after it. The University of Hong Kong provides this excellent guide to Corpus-based Language Learning. It recommends certain online corpora and
concordancingtools, and provides ideas on how a corpus analysis can support your academic work.
The Academic Word List is a list of the most frequently used words in academic writing. The Oxford Learner Dictionary divides the list into 10 sublists, with sublist 1 containing definitions of the highest frequency words.
