PhD Programme in General Pedagogy, Social Pedagogy, General Education and Subject Didactics

This mini-course in “Academic Writing in English” aims to familiarize PhD students with academic research conventions and academic discourse in English. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions and a thesis statement, how to present an argument, how to structure paragraphs for coherence and cohesion, and how to write an abstract in English for an academic audience. The course will focus on the use of authentic academic language and task-based learning. Genre and corpus approaches will be used to heighten learners’ awareness of academic language in use, through such observation skills as validating, formulating and checking hypotheses about the rhetorical structures and language characterising academic genres. Corpus work will contribute to learning by ‘noticing’ or ‘discovery’, encouraging students to adopt an inductive approach in analysing academic language. Participants will then produce an abstract based on the conventions analysed and following the guidelines provided.