Discovering Academic Vocabulary
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In our work as academics, we are always working with the terminology of our fields. These words and phrases are key concepts in our work, yet they are not common words in the language and many of them are new coinages.
All words have properties as do all of the concepts in our research fields. A word’s properties include its pronunciation, its internal structure, its relationships with related words and its grammar. Learning about the properties of words enables us to learn them systematically. We can be more confident in using words when we know their properties, and confidence is an important ingredient in fluency. This course is designed to develop vocabulary usage among academic teachers and students who are working in English as a foreign language. You are a university teacher or university student who works professionally in English, which is not your first language. Your English is good but you have to deal with a lot of vocabulary, known, half-known and unknown.
I am James Thomas, the creator and teacher of this course. I worked at Masaryk University in Czechia for 20 years but nowadays am mostly a British Council freelance teacher trainer and author of books on language teaching.
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The following topics are integrated throughout the course:
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