Advanced Skills in English

Advanced Skills in English is designed to hone and consolidate your English-language skills while at the same time examining in-depth the communication skills you will need in the future, either in academic or professional life.

For language study, we will analyse authentic podcasts, videos and articles from the mainstream media and academic sources, balancing listening and reading. Our emphasis will be on higher-level grammatical structures and specialist language used for advanced argumentation, and recognising implicit meaning beyond the actual words used, a key advanced language skill.

However, the main focus of this course is learning about and practising important skills, such as: 

• communicating data and communicating with data
• presenting complex arguments to a live audience
• designing, animating and presenting with Canva or PowerPoint 
• producing professional writing: policy briefs, business reports, case study analyses and a research paper. 

Along the way, we will be talking about current issues such as AI use, plagiarism, and how to evaluate and select sources of information.

Throughout the course, we will be asking you to think deeply about your individual learning needs and attainment.

The objectives for this course are:

• to provide a space for you to focus on your communication skills, discover your strengths and become much more confident when communicating in English
• to help you to identify and remedy any English language deficits and fill any relevant gaps in vocabulary and grammar

• to enable you to satisfy the CEFR C1 criteria as follows:

  Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for […] academic and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.

At the end of the course you should be confident in your own written and spoken output in English, ready for your next academic and/or professional step.

In presenza

This course is taught over one semester in the third year. Students are expected to already have a high level of language competence (B2+ or above, certificates not necessary). 

We will undertake a range of activities, including:

• language analysis and discovery based on selected articles and listenings
• writing/presentation workshops with peer review and constructive criticism
• individual learning reflections. 

The material we will be looking at covers six main topics, loosely connected to other courses that you will be doing or will have done, and to issues surfacing in the wider conversation on Economics-related topics. Provisionally, these will be:

• Globalization and international trade
• Financial and other markets
• Management trends and ethics
• Demographics, development & sustainability
• Marketing and advertising
• Information & the media

Because of the intensive feedback required from the lecturer, student numbers will be limited. 

Due to the very practical nature of this course and the importance of consistent engagement in all language-related learning, we will be giving credit for a variety of group and individual activities taking place throughout the semester, including: 

• in-class (formative) presentations
• end-of-course (summative) presentations
• private learning reflection
• various writing outputs 
• contributions to writing ‘workshops’.

There will be an examination at the end of the semester, which will include listening and reading comprehension and a number of written outputs, such as paraphrasing and summarising, integrating evidence into writing, interpreting and reporting on data, etc.