Academics’ Perspectives: desired outcomes from EAP input

As part of an induction to a pre-sessional programme for postgraduates that I will be teaching on this summer, I attended a session with several academics from four different disciplinary areas (Education, Engineering, Management, Biological Sciences) to discuss the particular issues that their international students faced. This was very useful not only because it enables pre-sessional … Read more

Trolls Drool

I have been working on a series of bilingual English-Chinese educational books based on characters created by my daughter when she was between 18 months and 3 years of age . These Magic People books are a little rough around the edges because they began life as drawing sessions for my daughter and child’s scribble … Read more

Critical thinking and the need for expert opinion

That well known Brexiteer and bane of UK teachers, Michael Gove, famously declared that Britons “have had enough of experts”. This strikes me as an extremely irresponsible comment, opening the door to all manner of pseudo-scientific nonsense to confuse and mislead the public without constraint.  I will explain my concerns through two examples where the … Read more

Student Feedback on Pre-sessional @ University of Bristol

I have spent most of July and August teaching on the University of Bristol’s pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme. This was a very rewarding experience. It was a chance to get back into the field in which I am now a certified expert. I was especially pleased to discover that visualisations formed a very important component of the course … Read more

RELATABLE: When is a word not a word and who decides?

Late in 2015, I started tutoring an undergraduate student who was studying education and creative writing. She had employed me to help her better organise her academic writing with the aim of raising her grade for her final dissertation. The first piece of work I helped her with was her proposal and this contained the … Read more

SEAGULL

I first heard somebody say that the use of the word seagull was wrong in the early 90s but had largely forgotten about it until this week when somebody corrected me for use of the word and the next day I happened across a letter to the Metro complaining about usage of the word (see image … Read more