ELT Experiences

Experiences of an English Language Teacher

Tag: Academic Writing

“Academic Writing: Mastering Citation and Referencing” by Paul Murphy

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“Academic Writing: Mastering Citation and Referencing”, written by Paul Murphy, is Prosperity Education’s latest publication with it being geared towards learners on pre-sessional university courses or for teachers who are teaching the principles of academic writing and skills. The author, Paul Murphy, is a teacher who has taught on various English for Academic Purposes (henceforth EAP) programmes in the UK as well as abroad. Paul has also co-written the “IELTS Academic Reading Practice”, along with Peter Clements, for Prosperity Education.

Contents list of “Academic Writing: Mastering Citation and Referencing” by Paul Murphy (2023 pp.4-5).

There are a total of ten chapters within this book, with each unit focusing on a particular skill in relation to academic writing. Prior to the ten separate units, there is an Introduction which guides the student (or teacher) into the intricacies of referencing: in-text citations, reference lists, the different reference styles, as well as the use of sources used in the publication being fictitious (purely used to demonstrate and offer opportunities for the reader to practise academic skills). The topics selected for each unit offer students the breadth of reading that would be expected for undergraduate or post-graduate studies. It is no wonder that Murphy has selected a variety of engaging topics to guide each of the skills, with those including World Languages, Human Rights, Film, or Business.

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Week Two of an Online Pre-Sessional Course

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Last week, I blogged about my first week with the online pre-sessional course that I am involved with, and this post continues with my second week of remote teaching.

I started the first day by emailing students of all necessary schedules for their course, highlighting important deadlines and times of live Zoom sessions. I also scheduled individual students for an allocated time of their one-to-one tutorial, spread over two days. One reason I wanted to spread the tutorial over two days was that when I decided to have the tutorials over one day, I felt exhausted and had little time to respond to issues as they emerged. The benefit I found of holding half the tutorials over a day was that I were able to spend time responding to issues by emailing students or providing further information.

Anyhow, the first day I prepared the necessary PPT for the following day, listened to the student self-study input sessions, and also reminded students to submit their newspaper article in preparation for this week’s tutorial. I find myself having to motivate students to complete and engage with tasks, when particular students are not so intrinsically motivated to complete their autonomous self-study tasks. Perhaps I over-analyse or expect too much from my students but I do understand that the course is very similar to what students encounter when they undertake their courses at university.

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Week One of an Online Pre-Sessional Course

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I have completed two weeks of an eight week pre-sessional course. Over the past month, I have shared some of the events leading up to the course which included a day of IT training and two days of induction to introduce this new course. I thought I would share my first week of teaching an online EAP course with my thoughts and reflections. I made quite a few mistakes during the first week and expectations were usually not met. However, apologies if this post rambles on and feel free not to read but I do hope that it offers an insight to others who have had similar experiences.

The first day of the course was quite stressful. There were no face-to-face sessions via Zoom and all interaction was to be handled asynchronously via the University Canvas website with introductions to be posted on the discussion forum by each pre-sessional group. I posted up a video for students to watch, but I noticed that had students used their mobile devices to access the discussion thread, the video would not have been visible. However, a script was included below the introduction video so students would have been able to view this instead. I was hoping that students would have posted up their own introduction video but all decided to introduce themselves with text in the discussion post. I suppose there were no brave souls out there willing to share their verbal introduction.

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