Workshop 1B
Title: Accessing Academic English

Abstract:
All students who intend to study at an English speaking university will be exposed to texts written in academic English. For many students, academic English texts can be difficult to understand as accessing the information contained in these texts can be challenging.
This presentation will describe how academic reading skills are developed in Level 4 of the new Insearch Academic English curriculum. The new Insearch AE curriculum teaches students how to understand academic English in two main ways. Firstly, by developing an awareness of the important ‘chunks’, or pieces of language, that must be treated as one unit of meaning. Secondly,  students are taught to recognise how the sentences in a paragraph, and throughout the text, develop the author’s ideas. These two skills provide students with the tools to access content in academic English texts.

Biodata:
Paul Vaughan has been a teacher at Insearch for 22 years. He has contributed to several different Insearch curriculum projects, including  an IELTS reworking in the mid 1990s, a revamp of level 7 in the early 2000s and two rewrites of level 8 in the mid 2000s. He has recently been involved in the major Insearch curriculum project, which has rewritten the whole language program from the ground up. This has allowed him to put into lessons the knowledge he has built up over the years.