Reading week one

Course introduction

Introductions

Find someone in the class who...

knows what a phrasal verb is.
can explain British humour.
knows an interesting fact about York’s history.
has travelled to more than five countries.
lives off campus.
can tell you the best place to socialise in York.

Independent Study Tools

English online learner dictionaries

Dictionaries that translate words into your first language can be very useful, but they often fail to give context to words and so don't really explain how to use them in a sentence. Below are some (but by no means the only) useful dictionaries to help you acquire new lexis.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English is a great starter dictionary which provides words in simple, authentic sentences and gives information about pronunciation.
Ozdic is a collocation dictionary. This means that instead of giving definitions, it tells you what words naturally go next to the word you're looking up.
A thesaurus works like a dictionary, but gives you words with similar meanings (synonyms) and opposite meanings (antonyms), so it's a useful tool for expanding your vocabulary and avoiding repetition in your writing.

Lexical frequency tools

These applications help you break down lengthy texts like journal articles and reports, and tell you useful information about the vocabulary.

Wordle is a word cloud generator. Word clouds aren't just pretty; they tell you what the most frequently occurring words are in a text: the bigger the word in the cloud, the more often it appears in the text and the more likely it is to be important to learn. You need to install this for it to run, so click the button to the left and then follow the instructions on screen.
Vocab kitchen is a lexical profiler, which means it will give you useful information about the vocabulary in a text such as an essay or journal article. In this case, it will tell you which words are on the Academic Word List, and how sophisticated they are according to the CEFR. Just like Wordle, paste the text into the input box, and then choose AWL or CEFR. Your teacher will talk more about both of these concepts in the course introduction.

Task

Find a news article in English or an academic article related to your discipline on Google Scholar, and paste the text into Wordle and Vocab Kitchen. What can you find out about the text?

Help with grammar, vocab and referencing

These websites contain excellent self-study exercises for students to do to strengthen their basic language and study skills for university life.

Bristol University's website has lots of quick and simple controlled practices for you to brush up on grammar basics. An excellent way to spend five minutes each day.
Using English for Academic Purposes contains reading, exercises and activities for most things academic that you could possibly want (and some that you don't!). Reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar and vocab are all catered for here.
The University of York's Harvard referencing guide is probably the most important page of all! Make sure you bookmark this one as you'll need it to make sure your in-text citations and reference list are accurate.
Yorkshare VLE also features EAP Toolkit, which has some great additional practice material for many of the concepts we'll be studying on this course.

Practice tasks

Where can you find out more about using modal verbs?
How do you write a reference list entry for a book chapter?
What's the best tool to use for finding out how to use a word in a full sentence?
Where can you find the learning outcomes for the module?
How much time should you be using your English outside of the classroom in order to improve?
What are some ways of practising your English that might be fun or interesting?

Independent reading

What's the best way of improving your language level? The best, and only, way is by getting as much experience in your target language as possible. So making the most of your reading experience is going to be very important. This doesn't just mean reading essays; you'll find this an arduous slog. A great way to improve your English is to read good fiction regularly. This doesn't mean the 'classics' that everyone thinks you need to read in order to be seen as intelligent. You decide what you enjoy reading. One of the best ways you can spend an hour is in a bookshop looking at titles you've never heard of but that look interesting. There's quite a large Waterstones in the centre of York which is a great place to go for inspiration. Their website also has recommendations to get you started.

Read some of the short descriptions under the titles (the blurb) and find one that you'd like to read.
In groups, compare notes on your findings.

Starting a vocabulary notebook

To help us build our range of language we need to find a way of lingering over certain new words, phrases and structures that we come across as we read. Just seeing a word once is not enough. Language learners need repeated exposure in context and opportunities to put the new language into production ourselves. So keeping a record of new language helps with this. Padlet is one platform that's good for keeping records of new language, as well as being helpful for organising academic life generally. Quizlet also helps you record vocabulary by creating records and flashcards.

Task

Start your first Padlet or set of Quizlet flashcards. We'll start by exploring the news headlines. Online news outlets such as BBC and The Guardian are popular in the UK, but explore as many other sites as you can. See if any news outlets in your country has an English language edition.

In your groups discuss any stories that you've found that are important or relevant to your field of study.
Share vocab items that you've recorded.

Keep reading!

Over the course of the term we'll allocate regular class time to group discussions of your independent reading, and share new language that you've picked up along the way. In the meantime, here are some cool titles to get you started...

Independent study materials for reading

There are a number of sites such as One Stop English which offer freely available reading materials for language students to practise reading comprehension and vocabulary building.

Work through the comprehension and vocabulary questions on this Guardian article on the topic of fake news.

Teacher's notes

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