HKU-CAES-Annual-Report_2021-22

ENGLISH LANGUAGE SUPPORT FOR RESEARCH POSTGRADUATES SPECIALLY-FUNDED ENGLISH COURSES The Centre offers all HKU MPhil and PhD four 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 CSS at CAES. In line with CAES’s mission to support English enhancement needs of university staff and taught postgraduate programmes, Specially-funded English Courses (SFEC) offer a variety of workplace and academic English workshops to meet these learning needs. All lessons are conducted as plenaries, lectures or small group tutorials using customised materials designed to cater to targeted learners’ professional and discipline-specific academic English demand. The courses are designed based on faculties’ requests for academic and workplace English support to meet the language needs of the university staff, undergraduate and taught postgraduate students. In the 2021-2022 academic year (Semester 1, Semester 2 and Summer Semester), 27 courses were offered to 1,553 students from different faculties (Dentistry, Education, Engineering, Medicine, and Social Sciences) and non-academic/administrative units at HKU. CAES offers the following four workshops focussing 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 maximise their communication effectiveness in their confirmation seminar and viva. Workshops The Centre 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 focussing on their confidence, fluency, pronunciation and knowledge of effective communicative strategies. Course This service aims to assist individual research postgraduate students who need help with their academic writing in English. All current MPhil/PhD students (including full-time and part-time are eligible for the above services during their candidature for their degrees, and each student is entitled to 4 hours of free consultation service. Graduate Student Academic Writing Support Background Background CAES WORK ANNUAL REPORT Centre for Applied English Studies 20 19