The Academic Writing Team

The members of the academic writing team are engaged with language for academic and specific purposes. Drawing upon the latest research, including our own, we develop and teach courses focused on English for academic purposes (EAP) and broadly in English for specific purposes (ESP). Our current pedagogical work includes tailor-made courses for participants across university faculties and constituents. We welcome the opportunity to develop courses in partnership with other units that have specific English needs.

Below is a list of specialized English courses that we have developed and are currently providing.

This course, offered in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering (LTH), focuses on professional communication for engineers across fields. The hands-on course provides an opportunity to strengthen oral presentation skills, deepen English abilities in written genres that engineers are expected to write in their work, and enhance technical vocabulary in English.

This course is offered as one of the faculty-wide courses for PhD students at the Faculty of Engineering (LTH) and aims to give participants an opportunity to develop their communicative strategies and academic writing skills to meet disciplinary demands. The course is organized around the writing of a research article, and participants work through the stages of planning, writing, and revising a research article that is later published. In this process, participants also practice providing constructive criticism on each other’s work. An explicit aim of the course is to increase participants’ awareness of the prevailing publication conventions in their specific field of study, with a primary focus on research articles.

This short hands-on course on English academic writing is aimed at students of physics who plan to write or are in the process of writing their degree project. The main objectives of the course are to help students improve their academic writing skills in English, raise awareness of the common issues and pitfalls of formal writing and help students communicate their ideas more efficiently. After students learn about these issues, they set out to write a short paper about quantum mechanics or the motivation for their degree project. They will then receive detailed feedback, both in writing and in an interactive feedback session.

This offering consists of two workshops which form an obligatory component for undergraduate students writing literature reports on the Terrestrial Ecology course. In addition, formative feedback on linguistic and structural elements is provided on students’ reports. The first of the two workshops explores various aspects of academic writing with a particular focus on both structure and positioning in relation to secondary literature. Students participate in a practical activity developing their in-progress drafts. The aim of the second workshop is to develop oral proficiency ahead of presentations of the reports.

In this component of the course Scientific Communication for PhD students at the Faculty of Medicine, participants write and give response to each other’s popular science texts about their own research area. The course as a whole focuses on developing participants' communicative strategies for presenting their research to different audiences and includes components on the scientific abstract, the grant proposal and the popular science text. By comparing these genres, participants are given the opportunity to reflect on how the language and structure of a text are related to audience concerns and to improve their English abilities across written genres.

This Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), offered in partnership with online learning provider Coursera, is a free resource for university students who are currently involved in writing assignments or degree projects as well as for students who wish to learn about academic writing in order to prepare for future writing tasks at university. Although the course provides guidance to all student writers, it targets specifically those who are writing in second language learner contexts and whose native language is not English.