Academic English (CIP)

As a multilingual academic communicator, you want to share your research with international peers in an effective and persuasive manner. Learn presentation skills that can assist you in speaking before international audiences. Practise writing to think through your research, communicate your thoughts in appealing texts and reflect on your practice.

This intensive course, designed as a series of interactive workshops, offers you an opportunity to work on a self-directed project within your discipline and communicate your expert knowledge in English. It invites you to reflect on your use of academic sources, AI literacy, presentation skills, writing habits and multiliterate writer identity.

• Choose a research problem to investigate (for example, a subject in your major courses). As the semester unfolds, follow the stages of researching and writing as two interlinked processes: focus your research question, conduct the literature review, collect the best evidence to argue for the importance of your research project.

• Read like a writer. Analyze model texts and sample texts written by your peers to better understand rhetorical strategies and stylistic conventions of selected academic text types.

• Practise presenting. Prepare three 3-minute presentations based on secondary sources about your research project – you deliver them for a small group of peers to benefit from feedback and academic exchanges. Present for 7 minutes in front of the whole class to share your views, engage in a question-and-answer session and hear comments on your performance.

• Write, give feedback, reflect. Draft selected sections of your research paper. Cite primary as well as secondary sources. Record your collaboration with GenAI (when you choose to use it). Critically analyze your own texts, rhetorical strategies, communicative habits, translanguaging, voice and presence. You exchange critically reflective writing and academic writing with your peers and receive comments from your tutor to develop as a multimodal communicator.

The semester of reading, writing, presenting and exchanging ideas with international peers from various disciplines helps you to become a more confident multiliterate academic communicator. This course will assist you in your future writing and presenting, not only in English but also in your other languages.

Questions about the course content can be emailed to: academicenglish@hum.ku.dk.

Testimonials

This course has helped me to understand how to write a structured and clear text. It has also taught me that the characteristics distinctive of an efficient article should be shared by our academic presentations – the ‘7-minute presentation’ was one of the most stimulating and complicated exercises that I had ever faced.

Francesca (BA, Italy)

This course is really great together with writing the BA project, because you can use the assignments, journal entries and presentations for this course to investigate elements of your other assignment: elements which you are not sure of or elements which you know are not suitable for the BA project, but very interesting.   

Camilla (BA, Denmark)

I think that especially my introductions, definitions of key concepts, literature reviews and conclusions are going to be more structured than they were before, not only in English but also in German. Also this course took a lot of my fear out of writing in English. Now I feel more prepared to start a Master’s study program in English.

Filip (BA, Germany)