CAES Annual Report 2019-2020

CAES ANNUAL REPORT 2019 – 2020 15 14 The Centre offers all HKU MPhil and PhD students a required core course, five workshops, and the Postgraduate Writing Support Service (via the Graduate School). It also offers a special intensive English course to selected postgraduate students. In addition, research postgraduate students can avail themselves of the Communication Support Services at CAES. In total, approximately 1,000 research postgraduate students attended these courses last year. Introduction toThesisWriting is the core course for research postgraduates. It aims to raise students’ awareness of the linguistic demands of writing a thesis and equip them with strategies to meet these demands. Two specialized versions of this course are offered to students to cater for those in the Humanities and related disciplines as well as those in the Sciences and related disciplines. The Centre also offers a special intensive English course for selected students from non-English medium universities. This course aims to develop students’ ability to produce coherent academic texts with grammatical accuracy and appropriate choice of vocabulary. It also helps students improve their speaking skills by focusing on their confidence, fluency, pronunciation and knowledge of effective communicative strategies. English Language Support for Research Postgraduates Courses CAES offers the following five workshops focusing on either speaking or writing skills: · The academic writing workshop helps students with specific language issues that have been observed to cause the most difficulties in writing a thesis and highlights areas of language use which are of particular relevance when reviewing the work of other researchers. · The academic speaking skills workshop provides ample opportunities for students to practise and refine their ability to present their research with their audience in mind. · The workshops Getting Published in Academic Journals (Sciences) and Getting Published in Academic Journals (Humanities) show students how to publish their research. · Another workshop, Managing Your Confirmation Seminar and Viva, aims at helping students maximize their communication effectiveness in their confirmation seminar and viva. Workshops In light of the COVID-19 situation in Hong Kong, unfortunately, the CAES was unable to offer the Summer Institute and English Support Programme in summer 2019-2020. We look forward to relaunching these courses next summer. Summer Courses