It's very important that students encounter uh... real language, authentic texts, authentic
lectures and so on,
so we've tried to build that into into the course.
The other thing that we've uh... used is uh... is the Cambridge Academic Corpus,
uh... and this is a large collection of of texts that we've drawn on in various ways
to
to make sure that examples are real,
and and that what we're saying does actually reflect an academic language
in in use.
Of course, uh...
it's challenging for students and sometimes teachers to be working with
with authentic texts
and what we've tried to do is to
uh... give students the uh... the necessary skills
to help them to to deal with authentic texts.
For example uh...
uh... in listening to lectures
uh... one of the things that that lecturers tend to do in authentic
lectures is to,
is to use various strategies to help students to focus on key information by
repeating, rephrasing and so on.
So equipping students with skills to cope
with uh... authentic text like lectures
and reading text and so on is
uh... an important part of it, of
the course.
One way we we tried to get the students' needs was to talk to the
students themselves so erm...
we interviewed uh... a number of
students, international students mainly, who were
uh... studying at British universities,
uh... and talked to them about the
challenges they faced at university
and the good things that they encountered at the university, and you
can see
uh... extracts from these interviews at various points during the uh...
over the the three course books.
We were lucky enough to have access to to three uh... corpora from from Cambridge.
There's the
uh... the Cambridge Academic Corpus.
uh... A corpus of about uh...
the written texts amount to about four million
words.
There's also a smaller corpus of uh... spoken language made up of lectures
and seminars mainly of about a million words.
And then also we looked at uh... a corpus of students' writing from uh...
IELTS papers so that that was useful too.
And I suppose essentally we've
used the corpora to uh... to do a number of things. I mean, one is to
check our own intuitions about language. I mean obviously we all have our intuitions
about how language works but it is useful to check it against
real data.
To some extent to uncover
new information uh... uh... about about how language is used in academic
contexts.
It's useful also as a source of examples
and in looking at the corpus of students' writing
we were able to pick out some
uh... examples of problems that students have and we can focus on those. So,
a couple of examples would be things like em
the use of uh... 'tend', 'trend' and 'tendency'
which is common language in an academic context but it causes problems
for for students. Another one would be 'people', 'person', 'peoples' which is is confusing.
Well, I think the most important thing about the course is that it's helping students
develop the necessary skills to deal with real academic English.
And so we have real texts, we have access to the
Cambridge Academic Corpus
and and that puts us in a great,
it gives us a great opportunity to
to help students in that way.