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Conventional collocations Collocations are words which are conventionally used together (e.g. collect data, change dramatically, highly significant, etc.). Collocation errors Violating collocation conventions can result in errors (e.g.…

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At university, you become part of an academic community. As with any other community, there are particular ways of behaving and particular values and practices that are important. As such, you will be expected to demonstrate these scholarly practices in your work.

This means that you will provide a reference any time you quote, paraphrase, summarise or use any information from another source. By doing so, you will be behaving ethically and honestly by acknowledging all your sources in your work, and will avoid any accusations of plagiarism.

By navigating through this site, you will find tutorials, guides and other resources that will enable you to provide appropriate references to the words, ideas, theories, data, pictures, videos etc. of others that are used in any of your assignments and avoid any accusations of plagiarism. Please use them!

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At university, you become part of an academic community. As with any other community, there are particular ways of behaving and particular values and practices that are important. As such, you will be expected to demonstrate these scholarly practices in your work.

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Raise your hand if you're like us and find the topic of 'taking lecture notes' rather... yawn... dull.

Is your hand up?

Yeah, it's not our favourite matter to discuss in a blog post, either. BUT, that doesn't negate the fact that it's a super-duper important skill that you really do need to master during your time at university. Get good at writing up your lecture notes and you're far more likely to do well in your exams and your essays. And who doesn't want to succeed at uni? The sooner you can learn how to take lecture notes properly, the more good habits you'll form and the better your overall success will be.

So with that in mind, this article is designed to give you an overview of the most common styles for taking lecture notes, as well as the different ways you can implement them and the best time to do it. Armed with this information, you'll be able to apply the strategy most suitable to you.

Sound good so far?

Now, we've packed rather a lot of information into this article, so here's a breakdown of its contents:

Remember - there's no 'one size fits all' technique for taking lecture notes. And, even if you find a strategy that works well now, it may not work so well six months or a year down the line. So be prepared to be flexible in how you continue to take great lecture notes as you move through your course(s).

Different ways to take lecture notes

It can be tricky to know the best way to take lecture notes. Should you write them down by hand? Or should you use a laptop or tablet? The answer here depends on a few variables. And there are benefits and drawbacks to both.

Taking lecture notes on a computer or tablet

Many people can generally type faster than they can write. This can make using a laptop or tablet for taking lecture notes very appealing. What's more, there are note-taking programs, such as Evernote or OneNote, to help with how you organise your lecture notes.

However, using a machine does have its downsides. First, there's the world of social media and the Internet at your fingertips which can be an easy distraction. Second, the note-taking process is usually quite linear - you start at the top of the page and work your way down. This isn't ideal for those who are visual-spatial learners, or if you don't consolidate information well in long-written form. Moreover, when typing, students tend to write out verbatim what is being said by the lecturer. They'll often focus more on typing everything out, instead of trying to really understand the material.

If you want to take lecture notes on a laptop or tablet, give yourself the best chance of success by being prepared. Learn how to type quickly, and create or learn a variety of shortcuts and abbreviations, to save yourself even more time during lectures. You also may need to create lists or tables, so knowing how to do this quickly can be particularly valuable.

Taking lecture notes on paper

Research suggests that we tend to retain more information when we take notes by hand. This is likely because writing lecture notes with a pen is slower than typing on a laptop, meaning you cannot write verbatim and must focus more on what is actually being discussed. When writing lecture notes by hand, your brain will generally be more 'engaged', so you're more likely to commit the information to your long-term memory.

In any case, taking lecture notes by hand is the obvious choice for some subjects - notably maths and languages - where the material isn't always linear text.

Taking lecture notes with pen and paper arguably has its benefits. But if you want to take your lecture notes this way, there are still skills and techniques you need to familiarise yourself with.

You might consider having one notebook for each class. This generally keeps things better organised. You'll also want different coloured pens or markers so that you can make sure those important things from the lecture are represented clearly in your notes. Finally, you must be able to write clearly. Your notes are no good to you if two weeks down the road all you see is illegible chicken scratch!

When to take lecture notes

When is really the best time to take lecture notes? The short answer is: often. Actually, you should take notes before, during and after each lecture. This means taking notes whilst you're doing any preparatory reading, as well as when you are listening in class. And, you need to review your lecture notes periodically after the lecture is finished. This can be done on a weekly basis, and then more frequently in the lead up to any exams or essay assignments.

Taking notes before a lecture

Before any lecture you need to do the assigned readings, at least to some extent. Your professors often tell students that this is an essential component of learning the course material (or having success in lectures). And yet, few students actually heed this advice.

So, do the reading. And whilst you're at it, take notes. The benefits here are three-fold (at least). First, familiarising yourself with the lecture material in advance will mean you're clued up on what will be discussed, and you can spend more time in the lecture focusing on the important bits. Second, going over the material at least twice will help you commit it to your long-term memory (great for exams). And third, you can jot down any questions you might have and ask them during, or after, the lecture.

Taking notes during a lecture

During the lecture it can be hard to know what to write down. Essentially, you only want to write down the main important points. You do this by becoming a really good listener. The trick to taking good lecture notes is to avoid the tangents your professor will take you on and try to pinpoint the stuff that is going to be on an exam or in an essay. Your professor is going to give you cues about what will be on the test. This will happen through some significant key phrases or signposts.

These might include:

"You need to know X" OR "X might be on the test"

Anytime the professor repeats himself/herself

Anything written on the board

Anything the professor says more loudly or with more emphasis

Anytime there is a relationship (e.g. first...second...finally)

Anytime there are significant signposts (e.g. especially, most significant, consequently, etc.)

There are probably many more cues that your professor will use in the creation of their lectures. Careful listening will turn you into a more efficient note-taker.

At the end of the lecture, your professor may give a summary, conclusion, or review of the material. These are the main takeaway points and are likely to be important. Don't pack up your bags early. Wait until the professor is done talking - in these last few minutes the professor may be telling you what s/he wants you to know come essay or exam day.

As a side note, remember that what you do and do not take away from the lecture are equally important. Did you have unanswered questions, or did your mind wander and miss a point? If the answer is yes, it is important to get these addressed earlier rather than later to make sure that you have a complete set of notes.

Taking notes after a lecture

Taking great lecture notes before and during your lecture, but then leaving them to collect dust, is a waste of your time. Soon after the lecture is done, spend some time reviewing your notes and clarifying any points that may seem a bit vague. A few minutes on the same day, plus 10-15 minutes a few days later, will be enough.

Also, you need to consolidate the notes you took when reading, and the notes you took during the lecture. Compare them side by side. Look at the different pieces of information and try and make sense of what you have written. Organise them in a way that is logical to you. Some might call this a master outline, but essentially what you are doing is figuring out the main ideas and putting them all down in a logical way.

Different note-taking styles

Now we'll take you through some of the more popular styles of taking lecture notes that people have used with success. It's important to note that many of these styles relate to using pen and paper, as with a laptop you are largely limited to a set linear structure (i.e. the outline method) which you can then modify or add to as you see fit.

The Cornell note-taking system

The Cornell note taking system is a format of condensing and organising notes without need for laborious recopying, by dividing paper into specific sections. There are six main aspects to the system:

1. Name, Date, Title: Every time that you start a new series of notes, you should record the name of the task (i.e. Lecture or Textbook Reading), the date, and the title/heading/subheading.

2. Record: This is the actual note taking process. It is interesting to note that this component only takes up 1/6 of the total method, demonstrating how important review and reflection is to the note taking process.

a. Divide your piece of paper into three sections (2-inch column on left - for "cues"; 6.5 inch "main space" on right - to make notes; 2-inch column on bottom to summarise).
b. During the lecture or as you read, keep notes in the "main space". Each time there is a new main point, skip a few lines.

3. Questions: After the class is finished, and preferably as soon as possible, formulate some questions that you have based on your notes. Write them in the left-hand column (the cue column). If you are reading the textbook, these questions might be issues you did not understand from the reading material, or things that you hope the instructor will cover in class. In this section you may also want to flag the main points that you felt were particularly significant (as additional cues).

4. Recite: Cover your notes - specifically, cover the right-hand section of your page so that only your questions and cues are visible. By looking at these questions and cue words, try and orally recreate your notes (in your own words). This helps shift your knowledge from the short-term memory to the long-term memory.

5. Reflect: Think for a few minutes about the material that you have learned. As yourself questions such as "what is the significance of these facts? What principles are they founded on? How do these ideas fit in with what I already know?

6. Review: Use the space at the bottom of each page that you have reserved for a summary. Once you have completed these summaries (this can be done at any point between the lecture/readings and an exam), use these summaries to help you review the weekly notes without having to go back and review everything you have written.

The Cornell method of note taking is particularly popular among students using a pen and pencil to take lecture notes. It is less applicable to those taking lecture notes on a laptop. What makes the Cornell method so appealing is that you start out with possible disarray in the main notes section, but through a bit of work, you end up with a fairly useful and straightforward structure. While this note taking method is popular, it is also time consuming, so it may not be possible to use it for every class.

Brainstorming and mind maps

Both of these methods are a graphic (pictorial) means of representing information. They work by relating each fact or idea to other facts or ideas. They're good for those who like visual representation of information. They are not particularly useful for those taking notes on a laptop. What you'll end up with is essentially a series of circles that connect via lines from one to another. To follow this method, begin in the middle of a sheet of paper.

1. Determine the main subject or topic. Write this title in the centre of page with a circle around it. Note that you can have more than one paper going at the same time. If you think you have the main topic and then that topic shifts, you can create a new mind map and then consolidate your notes later.

2. As major facts (subheadings) are presented that relate to the main subject/topic, draw lines out from the circle and label.

3. As additional facts are presented that relate to each subheading, draw these lines, linked to appropriate major fact and label.

4. Once you have created your visual representation of the material, use the space around the edge of the paper to pose questions. You can also use different coloured lines to connect different thoughts. You can also use the edge of the paper to clarify any points that you think are vague or confusing within your own mind map writing. This will help you when you come to review later.

5. After the final mind map is as complete as you want it to be, make sure that you review it at regular intervals in preparation of the final exam. It is important that you ensure that you can explain each of the concepts you have placed in circles, as these are the core focus of your understanding.

Brainstorming and mind maps are particularly good for visual learners, but they are sometimes hard to achieve in the actual lecture and are much more useful when taking notes from a textbook or reading. This is because if you are reading critically, you know what is coming next and can organise your brainstorm/mind map accordingly. If your next assignment is a written essay, the brainstorming/mind map method can work particularly well to help you clarify your thoughts and the links between them.

Linear note-taking / The outline method

This method of taking lecture notes is suitable for those using a laptop or tablet. It's also particularly ideal if you're studying the humanities or social sciences. You write general information to the left, and add more specific facts and clarifications indented to the right.

Being sure to write your points in an organised 'order', follow these guidelines to implement this method:

1. Start with a major point or topic - write it farthest to the left of the page or space on which you're making your notes.

2. Beneath it, write a series of more specific points relating to that major point, and indent the rule slightly.

3. Levels of importance of the specific points will be indicated by their vertical or horizontal distance away from major point.

4. Indentation can be simple (no marking, just space relationships) or more complex (by using Roman numerals, letters and/or decimals).

The linear method to taking lecture notes has several advantages. Firstly, it suits anyone who gets satisfaction from an orderly, neat formation to their notes. Better still, if you do it right, this system records not just content but also the relationships between aspects of the content. This can lead to better critical thinking skills, and makes this method particularly ideal for reviewing material. This is because the relationships between points are obvious and not much editing is needed.

And yet, the linear method does also have its disadvantages. It can be a challenging method to use in lectures, especially if you have an instructor that likes to jump from point to point, or one that commonly goes off on tangents. It also requires more thought in the class - accurately organising the material 'on the fly' isn't always easy. This trickiness is all exacerbated even further if your lecturer speaks particularly quick. Or if they like to talk for so long about one subject or maybe even two or maybe even three without so much as even pausing for a short breath that you wonder if they're actually a human robot who doesn't need to breathe at all maybe that's how they know so much about their subject or even two subjects or even three and is this sentence ever going to end...? Phew. Yes - linear note taking isn't for the faint-hearted.

But, if the essay you're working on requires a particular organisation of thought or themes, using this method of taking lecture notes can be very handy. So don't write it off immediately. It may be a good one to keep on the back burner and use when appropriate.

What is most important - as with other methods of taking lecture notes - is that you regularly come back to and review your notes. Writing them out once and never looking at them again won't get you very far.

The charting method

As suggested by its name, this method of taking lecture notes revolves around columns to organise your ideas. It can be used in a variety of different ways. Some students use it for lectures where there are going to be categories that are discussed, for example the different column types in a Fine Art History class. Other students find it helpful in a Maths or Chemistry class because the formula can be written in the first column, with the examples written in the subsequent columns.

If you're writing by hand during a lecture, you may find this technique more difficult, as it's almost impossible to know how many columns you are going to need in advance. Using a laptop makes it doable - you can simply add columns as you go, and remove them if needs be.

If you're unsure if the charting method may be suitable for you, consider it instead as a process to use when you are reviewing your notes. Re-organising things so that you can see the relationships not only helps you to become clearer with your understanding, but shifts your knowledge from your short-term to your long-term memory, too.

In perhaps the most basic model of the charting method, the following points should be completed:

1. Determine the categories to be covered.

2. Set paper up ahead of time by drawing columns with determined categories as headings for each.

3. Place the subsequent information in these appropriate columns.

But the charting method can be much more complex. Perhaps for a humanities-based subject, many students like to employ the KWL strategy. This divides the page into three columns. In the first column, there is a 'K,' which stands for 'What I know.' In the second column, there is a 'W' for 'What I want to know.' Finally, the last column is 'L,' which stands for 'What I have learned.' By using these three columns, you can easily see what you feel confident with and what still needs a bit more work. Further, you are going beyond the simple memorisation and looking for deeper connections.

The charting method of taking lecture notes has several advantages. Specifically, it's great for helping you track conversations and dialogues where you might become confused (i.e. if the professor speaks fast or if English is not your first language). In this method, there is less writing than in the other methods. It can be completed on a laptop or with pen and paper. It also puts things in a generally logical order, so it is easy to create comparisons and relationships.

What's more, it's a flexible method. You can choose how many or few columns you need based on the information in hand. It's one of the most practical ways to review for a final exam, because the information is evident and clear. If you leave enough space within each column you can always go back and review or add additional points if you think they are warranted. Overall, the charting method is a useful one that you might want to try at some point in your academic career.

There are few disadvantages to this method, but the ones that it does have are significant. First, spacing is important. There is a limited amount of space on a page and configuring your page to be most appropriate for the lecture or reading can be challenging. Secondly, you must be able to understand the lecture. This often means that you have been proactive and done the reading for the class prior to the beginning of the lecture. If this isn't something you do regularly, you might want to consider a different strategy for taking down lecture notes.

In summary...

By now, you should be familiar with some of the styles and techniques of taking lecture notes that are available for you to use as a student. Perhaps you've now decided what method you will implement from now on. Perhaps you are already using one, or more, if you study two subjects or modules with very different content structures. This is great! Note-taking strategies need to be learned, developed, and maintained in order for success.

Make sure that you think about how you learn best and how you are planning to use your notes later. If you choose to go the laptop route, make sure that you are backing up your notes at regular intervals (or saving them to the cloud). If you are using notebooks, keep them in a safe place.

Regardless of your past behaviour, becoming a good note taker is going to help you with memory and with the retention of information. Reviewing your notes at regular intervals is also going to help you while studying. And all of this is going to help you do better in exams and with writing essays as you journey through your academic career.

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Lecture notes: note-taking tips that really work | Oxbridge Essays

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Raise your hand if you're like us and find the topic of 'taking lecture notes' rather... yawn... dull. Is your hand up? Yeah, it's not our favourite matter to discuss in a blog post, either. BUT, that doesn't negate the fact that it's a super-duper important skill that you really do need to master during your time at university.

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Online resources

PLANNING TOOLKIT

ESSAYS

ASSIGNMENTS

PRESENTING

EXAMS

GRAMMAR AND EDITING

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

RESEARCH

THINKING AND NOTES

REFERENCING

SMART STUDY

MATHS AND STATS

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Participate in free, innovative academic skills development programs to improve your study techniques, time management, writing, communication, English language, maths, stats and research skills. You can get expert, one-to-one academic skills advice from UWA staff in a writing and study skills, English language, or maths and stats online consultation.

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Lectures

Introducing the topic

Hedging

Restating

Referring to authors

Referring to visual aids

Correcting

Moving on

Referring back

Recapping

Announcing a future topic

Identify the topic (quiz)

Psychology lecture

More exercises

Video exercises

Easier video exercises

Harder video exercises

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Introduction

This is the generic syllabus of the English Language Support Programme (ELSP) for UEA students. It has the theme and learner outcomes for each session.

Online activities are gradually being added to the programme. Look for the Extra activities links.

For more information, see the ELSP page on the UEA website.

Listening

3 Digressions in talks
Understand the role of digression in natural speech. Be able to identify markers signalling digression and be able to use this to aid comprehension of lectures and longer speaking turns.

4 Listening to discussions I: Listening for gist
Understand the importance of listening to the gist of what speakers are saying in multi-speaker discussions on topics relevant to their studies (e.g. seminars).

5 Listening to discussions II: Identifying point of view
Be able to identify strong positions and the language of agreement and disagreement in multi-speaker discussions.

Pronunciation

3 Sentence stress
Identify how stress patterns at sentence level. Examine how stress can influence meaning in longer utterances.

4 Intonation
Review how change in pitch can influence meaning in English. Practise common intonation patterns.

5 Connected speech
Identify some key features of connected speech. Practise weak forms and liaison features of spoken English.

Reading

Speaking

Writing

A

B

C

Oltmans et al.'s book complements the DSM-IV TR and presents case studies of each of the major disorders listed in the manual.

Research carried out by the Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Linas links consciousness to the activities of the thalamus in conjunction with the cerebral cortex.

Using this technique, he found that patients often revived painful memories reaching back even to early childhood.

Behavioural therapists attempt to use the principles of classical and operant conditioning to modify behaviour.
classification
The classification system, which lists 16 categories of maladjustment and more than 200 subcategories, is designed to improve the reliability of diagnoses by using observable behaviors to categorize disorders.

These were experimental psychology and clinical psychology, which was largely based on the psychoanalytical approach of Sigmund Freud and his followers.

According to evolutionary psychologists, one reason why men are better at spatial cognition than women is that men were the hunters who ranged far and wide for their prey.

As Piaget described it, cognitive development goes through several distinct stages.
collective
The collective unconscious, in contrast with Freud's unconscious, contains latent memory traces from a person's ancestors.
communication
The human vocal organs, breathing apparatus, auditory system, and brain are all specialized for spoken communication.

However, an individual with a physical inferiority may develop more generalized feelings of inferiority-leading to an unbalanced personality and what Adler termed an "inferiority complex," where the feelings of inferiority are never relieved.
comprehension
The mechanisms involved in perception, comprehension and production of speech are located in different areas of the cerebral cortex.
conditioned
For example, rats will learn a conditioned fear response faster if they receive higher levels of a painful stimulus.
conditioning conformity
Group norms are enormously powerful sources of conformity: we all tend to yield to the majority.
consciousness
The term " consciousness " is generally used to refer to an individual's awareness of his or her own thoughts, including sensations, feelings, and memories.
consistency
The failure to find behavioral consistency has been taken as an argument against the importance of personality characteristics in determining what a person will do.

Other areas in the medulla and thalamus have also been implicated in the control of sleep and waking.
correlation
It is more unusual for people to draw on memory and make memory-based judgements, but when they do there is a stronger correlation between memory and judgement.
counselling
In some cases, aversion therapy is used; in others, less intrusive forms of therapy involving extensive counselling are used.

D

E

F

It represents the synthesis of research findings regarding social behaviour from many other fields of science, including those from evolutionary psychology, anthropology and behaviour genetics.

Cattell suggests fluid intelligence is genetically inherited, which may account for individual differences.
forgetting
Forgetting takes place when a behaviour is not rehearsed (or a person does not think about a particular memory) for a long time.

Other well-known ways in which the unconscious reveals itself are through Freudian slips and the process of free association.
functionalism
The second reason for functionalism 's modern popularity is its obvious analogy to computer science.
fundamental
Critics have argued that all facial expressions are communicative and that to single out a group of emotional facial expressions ignores the fundamental social nature of facial expression.

G

H

I

K

L

Learning is a process in which neurons that fire together to produce a particular experience are altered so that they have a tendency to fire together again.

M

N

Knowing people from different cultures is one of the most effective ways of combating the formation of negative stereotypes and the development of prejudice .
nervous system
Neurons that convery impulses from receptors toward the rest of the nervous system are called sensory neurons.
neurobiology
But the extraordinary advances in neurobiology in the late twentieth century have revolutionised psychology.

Neurons that convery impulses from receptors toward the rest of the nervous system are called sensory neurons.
neuropsychology
Modern neuropsychology also relies on sophisticated brain imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

His research suggests that the female brain is largely hardwired for empathy, with females usually showing more sympathy for others, and greater sensitivity to facial expressions and non-verbal communication.
noticeable
In nineteenth-century Germany, Weber devised the concept of the just- noticeable difference (jnd), and Fechner used the jnd to measure the magnitude of sensations.

O

observation
Personality assessment is conducted through behavioral observations, paper-and-pencil tests, and projective techniques.

The response we make - in this case, picking up the phone when the phone rings and saying 'hello' - is called an operant behaviour.

P

Q

R

S

schizophrenia
Laing's main work centers on the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia -a serious mental disorder characterized by severe disruptions in psychological functioning-and on explaining it to ordinary people.
self-actualization
Maslow created a highly structured plan to explain the path of human motivation, defining the steps that humans need to follow as they move toward self-actualization.

Taste can be described as four basic sensations, sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

The brain reaches out to the environment via our sense organs, which respond to various stimuli such as light, sound waves, and pressure.

Our brains are bombarded with sensory information, but only a fraction of it reaches consciousness.

William James in The Principles of Psychology makes the distinction between primary ( short-term) and secondary (long-term) memory.

The sense organs detect changes in the environment and send signals through the nerves to the CNS.
situational
Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to our internal or personal factors, and negative outcomes to situational or external factors.
social behaviour
It represents the synthesis of research findings regarding social behaviour from many other fields of science, including those from evolutionary psychology, anthropology and behaviour genetics.
socialization
Maccoby's work to debunk stereotypes is considered fundamental to understanding children's socialization and gender differences.

Psychologists used to believe that thinking was "nothing more" than speech turned inwards.

Sleeptalking sometimes occurs as part of a REM sleep dream, but it more usually occurs during other stages of sleep.

Overt attention involves consciously directing the eyes, ears, or other sense organs toward a stimulus and processing information from it.

We will consider a few lines of evidence that relate to various potentially stress-producing situations.
structuralism
Structuralism is interested in "what is consciousness?" while functionalism is interested in "what is consciousness for?"

Some children are born with disorders associated with mental retardation (such as Down syndrome).

T

U

unconditional unconditioned
The hippocampus is also involved in learning the relationship between the unconditioned and conditioned stimulus when there is a delay between the presentation of each, a process called trace conditioning.
unconscious
Psychoanalysts explain the unconscious as the place where all the memories that we wish to push aside are stored, and cannot be retrieved consciously.

V

A

B

Alpha particles can usually be stopped by a piece of paper, beta particles can penetrate a few millimeters of aluminum, and gamma rays can penetrate several centimeters of lead.

An additional advantage of fusion reactors is that few radioactive by-products are formed.

C

D

These ramp experiments provided data that matched the predictions Galileo made in his hypothesis.

Both ¹²C and ¹³C are stable isotopes, meaning that their nuclei do not have a tendency to lose subatomic particles, a process called decay.

When John receives the message, he uses his private key to decode it

Because unlike poles attract, we can deduce that the geographic North Pole of Earth corresponds to the magnetic south pole and the geographic South Pole of Earth corresponds to the magnetic north pole.

For decades, the default approach has been to assume a "stationary" climate - one in which the odds of extremes have remained unchanged.
degradation
This highlights the link between environmental degradation and health.

Forestry experts have cautioned that Ghana's natural forests may run the risk of being depleted in the next 10 to 20 years.

The relationship between the incident pressure and the electric signal is microphone sensitivity, an important parameter in microphone design.

Sites like El Gigante that allow detailed analysis of maize over time, especially stretching back more than 4,000 years, are quite rare.

The system has the capability to detect planet-size bodies on the outer fringes of our solar system.

The next step is to adapt this device to test for and identify environmental contaminants.

In force diagrams, all forces are drawn as if they act at that point, no matter where the force is applied.
differentiate
Thanks to new spatial models that were used to evaluate the movement of the whales, we could differentiate behaviors and gauge the speed of the whales during their reproductive and migratory periods.

For small insects, diffusion through the tracheae brings in enough O ₂ and removes enough CO ₂ to support cellular respiration.
directional
Volunteers also were given directional coordinates within a predetermined segment of the Appalachian Trail and instructed to set up their camera within 100 meters of that location.

Women like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Williamina Fleming, and Annie Jump Cannon made some of the most important discoveries in astronomy in the early 20th century.

Following initial migration to Australia, Aboriginal groups lived in " discrete geographical regions" until the arrival of Europeans.

A circular eddy in the bay region may prevent its larvae from moving out into the Kuroshio Current and being dispersed northward up to Taiwan.

A major impediment to research has been the lack of accessible and reliable information on spills, wastewater disposal and the composition of fracturing fluids.
distribution
The distribution of the intensity of the different wavelengths varies with temperature.
disturbance
Activated carbon can be spread on the surface of a contaminated sediment or soil, without physical disturbance, and left in place to mix into the sediment surface.

Knowledge of archaeal biological diversity and their role in evolution has rapidly expanded in the past decade.

While climate change may be beneficial in this way to monarchs, there are also potential drawbacks.

Pan-STARRS also has given us an unprecedented view of the dynamic and transient nature of astronomical phenomena.

E

F

G

H

I

The image produced by a converging lens is real and inverted when the object is outside the focal point and virtual and upright when the object is inside the focal point.

The 27 antennas at the Very Large Array in New Mexico are used together to provide improved resolution for observing distant radio sources.

For example, proportional mortality of the kelp perch ( Brachyistius frenatus) rose as its density increased.

If friction is disregarded, the input torque will equal the output torque.
integrated
A computer motherboard is a multilayered collection of integrated circuits containing millions of transistors and other circuit elements.
interference
As they pass through one another, the waves interact to form an interference pattern of light and dark bands.
intermediate
The visible light that our eyes can detect occupies an intermediate range of wavelengths.

The flow of a fluid becomes irregular, or turbulent, above a certain velocity or under conditions that can cause abrupt changes in velocity, such as where there are obstacles or sharp turns in a river.

L

M

N

O

P

Q

By using GC-MS and GC-MS/MS techniques, it is possible to unambiguously identify and quantify a drug.

A vector is a physical quantity that has both direction and magnitude.

R

S

T

U

V

W

The human population may also be limited by the capacity of the environment to absorb its wastes.

Exercise

1. How old were the babies in the study?

2. Why did the study involve sucking? Because sucking is one of the few things that babies can do

3. Which language did the babies prefer? Their own language (French babies preferred French; Russian babies preferred Russian)

4. What features of language do the babies not know? Words and syntax

5. The lecturer mentions phonemic contrasts in what languages? English, Czech and Hindi

6. What arguments are given for speaking in a childlike way to babies? That it helps their language learning and that it calms them

7. At what age does the sensitivity to all phonemes disappear? Around twelve months

8. At what age do children start babbling? Around seven months

9. How different is the acquisition of sign language from the acquisition of spoken language? It is not different at all

10. Why might sign languages be thought harder to learn? Because the brain and the body have adapted for speech

11. Between the ages of one and two, what are the various language stages that children master? Using words, showing some sensitivity to the order of words, learning words faster, producing little sentences, using the function morphemes

12. What is the bad news? The ability to learn language declines with age

13. What factors do not affect how well immigrants learn English? Intelligence, number of family members, motivation

14. What is particularly hard for older learners to lose?

Gap fill

Watch the video and complete the gaps.

1. [Student question] They would gaggle and coo back at the baby. [Student question]

2. One of the real surprising findings in my field over the last ten/twenty years has been that the acquisition of sign languages has turned out to be almost exactly the same; in fact, as far as we know, exactly the same as the acquisition of spoken languages. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been just as reasonable to expect that there'd be an advantage for speech over sign. That sign languages may be full-blown languages but they just take - they're just harder to learn because the brain and the body have for speech. It turns out that this just isn't the case. It turns out that sign and - the developmental milestones of sign languages and the developmental milestones of spoken languages are the same. They start babbling at the same point. They start using first words, first sentences, first complicated constructions . There seems to be no interesting difference between how the brain comes to and use the spoken language versus a sign language.

Transcript

1. What do we know about the time course of language? Well, early on children start off and they prefer the melody of their own language. These studies were done in France with four-day-old babies. And what they did was they used a sucking method. Remember, there's a limited number of things babies can do. One of the things they can do is suck, and these babies would suck on a pacifier to hear French. And they would prefer to hear French than to hear Russian. And these investigators claimed this is because they had been exposed to French in the first four days of their lives. Reviewers, mostly from France, objected and said, "No. Maybe French just sounds better. Everybody's going to like French." So, they re-did the study in Russia. Russian kids sucked harder to hear Russian than they did to French.

2. And what they're listening to isn't the words. They don't know words yet. They don't know of syntax yet. It's the rhythm of the language. For you, French and Russian sound different. Even if you're like me and you don't know a word of either language, they still sound different. They sound different to babies too. And a baby being raised in France or a baby being raised in Russia knows enough to tell what's his language and what isn't.

3. Early on, children are sensitive to every phoneme there is. So, English-speaking children, for instance, can - English-speaking babies - babies who are born in the United States - can distinguish between English phonemes like "lip" and "rip" but they could also distinguish between phonemic contrasts that are not exemplified in English, such as phonemic contrasts in Czech or Hindi. Yes.

4. [Student question] They would gaggle and coo back at the baby. [Student question]

5. There's a lot going on in your question. [laughter] Some raising - Well, there's a lot going on in your question. The answer to the question - The question was, "your baby's going to coo and 'ga ga, goo goo,' does it matter if you coo and 'ga ga, goo goo' back?" No, it doesn't make a difference. Your hatred towards them was unmotivated. You can be relieved of that debt, or now you know you feel bad now, I guess. [laughter] If you speak to your children in perfect English, it's very strange. Nobody speaks to their babies in, "Hello, Son. It's time - Oh. You want to change your diaper right now so stay still." That's bad parenting. It sounds kind of silly. More - What most people do is, "Oh. You're such a cute little baby." And it probably - One - There's - Evolutionary psychologists debate the function of why we talk funny to babies. And some people have argued that it does help their language learning. And some people have argued instead that what it does is it calms them. They like to hear the music of a smooth voice and so on. But whether or not you do so doesn't seem to make a big difference.

6. It is very difficult to find any effect of how parents talk to their kids on how their kids learn language, particularly when it comes to babies. So, early on babies can - are sensitive to all phonemes and then that goes away. Around twelve months of age it goes away. This is one thing you were much better at when you were a baby than you are now. When you were a baby you were a multilingual fool. You could understand the sound differences of every language on earth. Now, if you're like me, you could barely understand English. [laughter] You narrow down until you're sensitive just to the language you hear. And this narrowing down is largely in place by about twelve months of age.

7. Around seven months is babbling. And I want to stop at this point to go back to the issue - I promised you I would turn a bit to sign language and I want to describe now a very elegant - I want to show a little film now of a very elegant series of experiments looking at the question of whether babies who are exposed to a sign language, babble. [film plays]

8. One of the real surprising findings in my field over the last ten/twenty years has been that the acquisition of sign languages has turned out to be almost exactly the same; in fact, as far as we know, exactly the same as the acquisition of spoken languages. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been just as reasonable to expect that there'd be an advantage for speech over sign. That sign languages may be full-blown languages but they just take - they're just harder to learn because the brain and the body have adapted for speech. It turns out that this just isn't the case. It turns out that sign and - the developmental milestones of sign languages and the developmental milestones of spoken languages are precisely the same. They start babbling at the same point. They start using first words, first sentences, first complicated constructions. There seems to be no interesting difference between how the brain comes to acquire and use the spoken language versus a sign language.

9. Around twelve months of age, children start using their first words. These are words for objects and actions like "dog" and "up" and "milk." They start showing some sensitivity to the order of words. So they know that "dog bites cat" is different from "cat bites dog." Around eighteen months of age, they start learning words faster. They start producing little, miniature sentences like "Want cookie" or "Milk spill" and the function morphemes, the little words, "in," "of," "a," "the," and so on start to gradually appear.

10. Then the - Then there's the bad news. Around seven years of age going up through puberty, the ability to learn language starts to go away. The best work on this has been done by Elissa Newport and Sam Supalla who have studied people who have been in the United States for many, many years - 30, 40 years - and seeing how well they have come to speak English. And it turns out the big determinant of how well you speak English as an immigrant isn't how smart you are. It's not how many family members you have when you're here. It's not your motivation. It's how old you were when you started.

11. It turns out that if you start learning a language - a second language is where most of the work's been done - within the first few years of life you're fine. You'll speak like a native. But then it starts getting worse and worse. And once you hit puberty, suddenly there's huge variation in the abilities you have to learn language. It is very rare, for instance, for somebody who has learned English past puberty to speak without an accent. An accent is very hard to shake and it's not just an accent. It's also other aspects of phonology, syntax, and morphology. It's like the part of the brain that's responsible for language learning is only around early in development and if you don't get your language by then it'll just run out.

12. I want to begin next class with this question, the question of animals. And that will shut down the language learning part. But one thing I'll put up here is your second reading response. So, I'll also put this up on Wednesday, and by Wednesday you might have a bit of a better - be in a better position to answer this question. But I'll continue with language on Wednesday and then we'll also talk about vision, attention, and memory. I'll see you then.

Video source

Paul Bloom, Introduction to Psychology (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed 10 June 2013). Licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Terms of Use

Exercise

Gap fill

Words from the Academic Word List have been hidden in this transcript. Watch the video and complete the gaps.

1. Well, there's a claim about the origin of language associated with the guy who we met when we talked about behaviourism who wrote A Review of Verbal Behaviour, the linguist Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky makes this claim. And this is that we shouldn't view language learning as learning at all. Instead, we should view it as something to growth. So he says,

2. No one would take seriously the proposal that a human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic of particular organs results from accidental experience. [Language] proves to be no less marvellous and intricate than these structures . Why, then, should we not study the acquisition of a cognitive like language more or less as we study some bodily organ?

3. On the other hand, there is considerable that the development of these language skills, in some way, is to growth in the way that Chomsky suggests. So, here are some basic facts about language development. One is something which I had mentioned before. All children learn language. There can be impairments of language. Now, again, we spoke about them before when talking about the brain. Some of these impairments could be due to trauma, the aphasias. Trauma, a blow to the head, a stroke can rid you of your language. But, also, there are genetic disorders, some falling under the rubric of what's known as " language impairment," where children are born without the same ability as the rest of us to learn to speak. And these are interesting in many ways.

Transcript

1. Well, there's a radical claim about the origin of language associated with the guy who we met when we talked about behaviourism who wrote A Review of Verbal Behaviour, the linguist Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky makes this radical claim. And this is that we shouldn't view language learning as learning at all. Instead, we should view it as something similar to growth. So he says,

2. No one would take seriously the proposal that a human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. [Language] proves to be no less marvellous and intricate than these physical structures. Why, then, should we not study the acquisition of a cognitive structure like language more or less as we study some complex bodily organ?

3. So, you might learn to play baseball, you might learn about the American Civil War, but if Chomsky is right you didn't learn to speak English. Rather, what happened is you heard English and - but the capacity grew in your head and something a lot more similar to the development of arms or legs or a visual system.

4. Well, should we believe this? We know there has to be some effect of the environment shaping language, obviously, because in order to know English you have to have heard English, in order to know Dutch you have had to heard, to - had to have learned and heard Dutch. And in fact, languages differ in all the ways that we were talking about. Some languages like English has a - have a distinction between 'l' and 'r.' Other languages do not. For a language like English, that creature there is referred to with the morpheme "dog." That's a historical accident of English. In French it's "chien" and in Greek it's something else. And each of those 6,000 languages and people in the room who know another language would say, "Yeah, in Vietnamese it's this," "In Urdu it's this," "In Czech it's that."

5. Finally, there is syntax. So, English is what's known as a subject-verb-object language. That means if you want to convey the idea that Bill hit John, you would say, "Bill hit John." But not all languages work that way. In fact, the majority of languages, more languages, are actually subject-object-verb languages. So, you would say, if you wanted to convey that Bill was the hitter and John was hit, "Bill John hit." All of this has to be learned. And all of this has to be learned through exposure to language users.

6. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that the development of these language skills, in some way, is similar to growth in the way that Chomsky suggests. So, here are some basic facts about language development. One is something which I had mentioned before. All normal children learn language. There can be specific impairments of language. Now, again, we spoke about them before when talking about the brain. Some of these impairments could be due to trauma, the aphasias. Trauma, a blow to the head, a stroke can rid you of your language. But, also, there are genetic disorders, some falling under the rubric of what's known as "specific language impairment," where children are born without the same ability as the rest of us to learn to speak. And these are interesting in many ways.

7. One reason that they're interesting is that they illustrate something about human language. It is not - It would not be unreasonable for you to think before listening to this lecture, "Look. All you need to have to learn a language is to be smart" or "All you need to have to learn a language is to want to communicate" or "All you need to have to learn a language is to be a social person wanting to - having the ability to understand others and deal with others." But the cases of specific language impairments suggest that all of that is wrong, because there are children in this world right now who are plenty smart, who really want to communicate, and who are entirely social creatures but they can't learn language. And this suggests that the ability to learn language and understand language is to some extent separate from these other aspects of mental life.

8. Continuing on this theme, we also know that language is learnt without any sort of feedback or training. There are many Americans who believe that they need to teach their children language. And there's a huge industry with DVDs and flash cards and all sorts of things designed to teach your children language. And I think many parents believe that if they didn't persist in using these things their children would never learn to speak. But we know that that's not true. We know that this isn't true because there are communities where they don't speak to their kids. They don't speak to their kids because they don't believe it's important to speak to their kids. Some linguists would interview - Linguists would interview adults in these communities and say, "Why don't you speak to your babies?" And these adults would respond, "It'd be ridiculous to speak to a baby. The baby has nothing to say. You might as well just speak to your dog." And then the American linguist would say, "Yeah. We speak to our dogs." [laughter] Americans and Europeans speak to everything and everybody. Other cultures are more picky and they don't talk to their children until their children themselves are talking. This doesn't seem to make much of a difference in language learning.

9. Some studies have, motivated by Chomsky's work in expressed - sorry, motivated by Chomsky's critique of Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, have asked even in - "What if we just looked at children within the United States? Don't these children get feedback?" And the answer is yes and no. So your average highly educated Western parent does give their children feedback - do give their children feedback based on what they say. But they don't typically give feedback based on the syntax or grammaticality of what they say.

10. The example given by Brown and Hanlon in the classic study in the 1970s is they did all of these studies looking at what children say and how parents responded, and it turns out parents respond not to the grammatical correctness but to the affect or cuteness or sociability of the utterance. So for instance, if a child says to his mother, "I loves you, Mommy," it's a very unusual parent who would say, "Oh, no. The verb agreement is mistaken. [laughter] You've added a redundant 's.' It's not appropriate." Similarly, if a child is to say, "I hate your guts, Mother," it's an unusual mother, "That's wonderful. There's a subject, verb, object. The whole thing's structurally fine." We respond to our kids like we respond to each other based on the message that's conveyed, not the grammaticality of the utterances. Children make grammatical mistakes all the time but then they go away and they go away without correction. So those are some basic facts.

Video source

Paul Bloom, Introduction to Psychology (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed 24 June 2013). Licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Terms of Use

Exercise

1. How many phonemes does English have?

2. What two phonemes exist in English but not in some other languages?

3. Besides phonemes, what else do you have to learn? The boundaries between the words

4. What does an oscilloscope prove? There are no pauses between words

5. Where do the pauses come from? Your mind - they are a psychological illusion

6. What two languages does he mention next? French and Hebrew

7. What do the song lyrics illustrate? Misunderstandings of the lyrics by children

8. What does your mind do when you don't hear a word clearly? It fills in the gap and figures out what the word is

9. Who is the singer that he mentions?

10. What is the mental action called that fills in gaps? Top-down processing

11. Why didn't he want to buy "Get Crunk" for his children? It contained bad language - obscene words

12. Besides sound, what else gets cleared up by our minds? Vision - how we see the world

Gap fill

Words from the Academic Word List have been hidden in this transcript. Watch the video and complete the gaps.

You could see this when you hear a language you don't already know. So, for those of you who have never heard French before, when you hear somebody say, "Je ne sais pas" you could say, "Remarkable! French has no pauses between words." And you - And now a French speaker, of course, hears "Je ne sais pas." For Hebrew, I know one sentence in Hebrew: "Sleecha, eypho ha-sheeruteem" which I think is a request for the bathroom. But if you don't know Hebrew there's no pauses. And the truth is, when you each gave your demonstrations , nobody spoke properly because nobody spoke - Here's the sentence: "Glorp [pause] fendel [pause] smug [pause] wuggle." Rather, you all sounded like, "blublublublublub" without any pauses because I don't know your languages.

Transcript

1. So, phonology. Phonology is the system of sounds that languages have. There's a subset. There's a list, a finite list, of possible sounds that language can use. I'm going to put aside for the moment the question of sign languages and how they work. I'm going to talk about them in a little bit. The idea is that English has about forty of these phonemes. So, if you're a native monolingual speaker of English you hear speech and each sound you hear is categorized as falling into one of those forty morphemes - sorry, phonemes. So, for example, English has a phoneme of "lu," "l," and a phoneme of "r." And so, an English speaker can hear the difference between "lip" and "rip" and that corresponds to two different words in English. Other languages don't have that distinction and so those distinctions are very difficult for non-native English speakers to learn.

2. So part of what goes on when you learn is you have to learn the language - the phonemes that your language has. Another part of the problem of learning language is you have to figure out what the boundaries are between the words. You have to use sound signals to figure out the boundaries between the words. Now that - If the only language you've ever heard is English, that's going to seem like a really weird example of a problem because you're listening to me speak and in between each of my words you're hearing a pause. You don't have to be very smart to figure out where one word begins and one word ends. But the pause is a psychological illusion. If you were to just talk into an oscilloscope that measured your sound vibrations, there are no pauses between the words. Rather, the pauses are inserted by your mind as you already know where one word begins and another one ends. And you insert a pause at that point.

3. You could see this when you hear a language you don't already know. So, for those of you who have never heard French before, when you hear somebody say, "Je ne sais pas" you could say, "Remarkable! French has no pauses between words." And you - And now a French speaker, of course, hears "Je ne sais pas." For Hebrew, I know one sentence in Hebrew: "Sleecha, eypho ha-sheeruteem" which I think is a request for the bathroom. But if you don't know Hebrew there's no pauses. And the truth is, when you each gave your demonstrations, nobody spoke properly because nobody spoke - Here's the sentence: "Glorp [pause] fendel [pause] smug [pause] wuggle." Rather, you all sounded like, "blublublublublub" without any pauses because I don't know your languages.

4. Children come into the world without knowing any specific language and so they have to learn pauses. They have to learn to interpret sounds in context and sometimes they make mistakes. They get problems of segmentation. And there are some illustrations. You could see their mistakes if they're trying to repeat back something that's already known within a society. So songs are a good example. These are excerpts from children. "I'll never be your pizza burnin'." Anybody know - figure out what that corresponds to? "Beast of burden." Very good. "A girl with colitis goes by." Somebody? [Student: "A girl with kaleidoscope eyes."] "The ants are my friends; they're blowin' in the wind." And [laughter] this is a religious one. "Our father with Bart in heaven; Harold be they name... Lead us not into Penn Station..."

5. Now phonological understanding illustrates all sorts of aspects of language processing and in fact of consciousness. Because remember I said that typically when you hear a sentence you make - you manufacture in your mind gaps between the words. Typically when there's something which is unclear you'll fill in the gap and figure out what the word is. And you'll hear it that way. So, the few examples - The best examples again are for when it goes wrong.

6. So, a classic example is from the song "Super Freak" by Rick James. I got a big lecture about copyright laws and this is going to violate most of them. Rick James is going to be sitting on the - at - staring at the web two years from now saying, "Hey. That's my thing." Okay. So I want you to listen to this line. I'm sure most of you have heard this before but I want you to listen closely. [music playing] What was that last line? [laughter] "The kind of girl you read about - " Well, it turns out that nobody really knows. And it sounds to many people who do top-down interpretation as - to me as well, that "she's the kind of girl you read about in Newsweek magazine." But that makes no sense at all given that you don't want to "bring home to Mama." And she's - and it's not the - and in fact, if you check the notes on the song, she's in fact, "the kind of girl you read about in new wave magazines." Now, when you listen to it then, again, knowing that, you hear it that way. [music playing]

7. Now, this top-down - This is known as "top-down" processing. Top-down processing is an example of when you know what something is you hear it that way. And this is extremely useful when it comes to filling in gaps in sounds. In normal conversation, if I'm to say "s - [coughs] entence" you won't hear that as "s - [cough] entence." Rather, you hear "sentence." You fill in the gap. This can lead to problems. The problem it's led to in my life revolves around the song "Get Crunk" [laughter] because I heard "Get Crunk" and my children asked me if I would buy them "Get Crunk" from iTunes. My children are eight and ten. And now "Get Crunk," as I was aware from having heard it before, involves the consistent refrain of "get crunk" extremely bad word, "get crunk" extremely bad word, and so I said "no." And then they said, "Well, there's a clean version of it." So, I downloaded the clean version. Unfortunately, knowing what the clean version - knowing what the word is means to me the clean version is not very clean. Now, I will add, [laughter] before people write letters and stuff, this is the clean version. [laughter] Thank goodness they took away that obscene word. [laughter]

8. Okay. So, top-down processing affects how we hear things, usually, almost always, for the better. And in fact, this is a theme we're going to return to next class when we talk about vision because the same thing is going to happen there. How we see the world is often confusing and befuddled but what we know can clear things up. Same with sound.

Video source

Paul Bloom, Introduction to Psychology (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed 10 June 2013). Licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Terms of Use

Exercise

Gap fill

Words from the Academic Word List have been hidden in this transcript. Watch the video and complete the gaps.

Transcript

1. This class today is about language. And language is, to a large extent, where the action is. The study of human language has been the battleground over different theories of human nature. So, every philosopher or psychologist or humanist or neuroscientist who has ever thought about people has had to make some claim about the nature of language and how it works. I'm including here people like Aristotle and Plato, Hume, Locke, Freud and Skinner. I'm also including modern-day approaches to computational theory, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. If you hope to make it with a theory of what people are and how people work, you have to explain and talk about language. In fact, language is sufficiently interesting that, unlike most other things I'll talk about in this class, there is an entire field devoted to its study, the field of linguistics that is entirely devoted to studying the nuances and structures of different languages.

2. Now, I'll first, before getting into details, make a definitional point. When I'm talking about language I'm meaning systems like English and Dutch and Warlpiri and Italian and Turkish and Urdu and what we've seen and heard right now in class in the demonstration that preceded the formal lecture. Now, you could use language in a different sense. You could use the term "language" to describe what dogs do, or what chimpanzees do, or birds. You could use language to describe music, talk about the - a musical language or art, or any communicative system, and there's actually nothing wrong with that. There's no rule about how you're supposed to use the word "language." But the problem is if you use the word "language" impossibly, incredibly broadly, then from a scientific point of view it becomes useless to ask interesting questions about it. If language can refer to just about everything from English to traffic signals, then we're not going to be able to find interesting generalizations or do good science about it.

3. So, what I want to do is, I want to discuss the scientific notion of language, at first restricting myself to systems like English and Dutch and American sign language and Navajo and so on. Once we've made some generalizations about language in this narrow sense, we could then ask, and we will ask, to what extent do other systems such as animal communication systems relate to this narrower definition. So we could ask, in this narrow sense, what properties do languages have and then go on to ask, in a broader sense, what other communicative systems also possess those properties.

4. Well, some things are obvious about language so here are some; here are the questions we will ask. This will frame our discussion today. We'll first go over some basic facts about language. We'll talk about what languages share, we'll talk about how language develops, and we'll talk about language and communication in non-humans.

5. I began this class with a demonstration of - that illustrates two very important facts about language. One is that languages all share some deep and intricate universals. In particular, all languages, at minimum, are powerful enough to convey an abstract notion like this; abstract in the sense that it talks about thoughts and it talks about a proposition and spatial relations in objects. There's no language in the world that you just cannot talk about abstract things with. Every language can do this. But the demonstration also illustrated another fact about language, which is how different languages are. They sound different. If you know one language, you don't necessarily know another. It's not merely that you can't understand it. It could sound strange or look unusual in the case of a sign language. And so, any adequate theory of language has to allow for both the commonalities and the differences across languages. And this is the puzzle faced by the psychology and cognitive science of language.

6. Well, let's start with an interesting claim about language made by Charles Darwin. So, Darwin writes, "Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write." And what Darwin is claiming here, and it's a controversial and interesting claim, is that language is special in that there's some sort of propensity or capacity or instinct for language unlike the other examples he gives. Not everything comes natural to us but Darwin suggests that language does.

7. Well, why should we believe this? Well, there are some basic facts that support Darwin's claim. For one thing, every normal - every human society has language. In the course of travelling, cultures encounter other cultures and they often encounter cultures that are very different from their own. But through the course of human history, nobody has ever encountered another group of humans that did not have a language. Does this show that it's built in? Well, not necessarily. It could be a cultural innovation. It could be, for instance, that language is such a good idea that every culture comes across it and develops it. Just about every culture uses some sort of utensils to eat food with, a knife and a fork, chopsticks, a spoon. This probably is not because use of eating utensils is human nature, but rather, it's because it's just a very useful thing that cultures discover over and over again. Well, we know that this probably is not true with regard to language. And one reason we know this is because of the demonstrated case studies where a language is created within a single generation. And these case studies have happened over history.

8. The standard example is people involved in the slave trade. The slave trade revolving around tobacco or cotton or coffee or sugar would tend to mix slaves and labourers from different language backgrounds, in part deliberately, so as to avoid the possibility of revolt. What would happen is these people who were enslaved from different cultures would develop a makeshift communication system so they could talk to one another. And this is called a "pidgin," p-i-d-g-i-n, a pidgin. And this pidgin was how they would talk. And this pidgin was not a language. It was strings of words borrowed from the different languages around them and put together in sort of haphazard ways.

9. The question is what happens to the children who are raised in this society. And you might expect it that they would come to speak a pidgin, but they don't. What happens is, in the course of a single generation, they develop their own language. They create a language with rich syntax and morphology and phonology, terms that we'll understand in a few minutes. And this language that they create is called a "creole." And languages that we know now as creoles, the word refers back to their history. That means that they were developed from pidgins. And this is interesting because this suggests that to some extent the ability to use and understand and learn language is part of human nature. It doesn't require an extensive cultural history. Rather, just about any normal child, even when not exposed to a full-fledged language, can create a language.

10. And more recently, there's been case studies of children who acquire sign language. There's a wonderful case in Nicaraguan sign language where they acquire sign language from adults who themselves are not versed in sign language. They're sort of second-language learners struggling along. What you might have expected would be the children would then use whatever system their adults use, but they don't. They "creolized" it. They take this makeshift communication system developed by adults and, again, they turn it into a full-blown language, suggesting that to some extent it's part of our human nature to create languages.

11. Also, every normal human has language. Not everybody in this room can ride a bicycle. Not everybody in this room can play chess. But everybody possesses at least one language. And everybody started to possess at least one language when they were a child. There are exceptions, but the exceptions come about due to some sort of brain damage. Any neurologically normal human will come to possess a language.

12. What else do we know? Well, the claim that language is part of human nature is supported by neurological studies, some of which were referred to in the chapters on the brain that you read earlier that talk about dedicated parts of the brain that work for language. And if parts of these brains - if parts - if these parts of the brain are damaged you get language deficits or aphasias where you might lose the ability to understand or create language. More speculatively, there has been some fairly recent work studying the genetic basis of language, looking at the genes that are directly responsible for the capacity to learn and use language. And one bit of evidence that these genes are implicated is that some unfortunate people have point mutations in these genes. And such people are unable to learn and use language.

Video source

Paul Bloom, Introduction to Psychology (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed 10 June 2013). Licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Terms of Use

Introduction

Academics use cautious language when making statements that could be challenged or where the truth may be more complicated. This is also called hedging.

For example, you might want to write: Young girls like playing with dolls.

This statement is too simple. Some young girls are not interested in dolls. Also, do girls instinctively like dolls or is this learned behaviour? A safer claim is: Many young girls like playing with dolls or Young girls tend to like playing with dolls.

Examples

1. Adverb

Her death was almost certainly preventable.

Approximately 5,000 schools are still closed in Sindh.

Food security frequently takes precedence over obesity in these countries.

Bail hearings nearly always occur within twenty-four hours of the initial booking.

Stress often causes people's eating habits to change.

Poor neighbourhoods in Chicago, primarily on the city's South and West sides, have limited access to a pharmacy.

The odd tubular structures were probably formed by crystal growth, not tiny burrowing creatures.

All wars are somewhat similar when you consider the element of human tragedy.

Flu typically consists of fever, headache, tiredness and respiratory symptoms that resolve within 7 days.

When homicides occur, though, they usually are at the hands of someone the victim knows.

2. Prepositional phrase

However, in most cases the proportion of variance explained by genetic risk scores prediction R-squared remains substantially lower than the trait heritability.

Their development depends to some extent on the neighbourhoods in which children grow up.

3. Adjective

Rents are likely to rise when the vacancy rate falls.

One possible explanation is that the work has been done based on assumptions about how raindrops and snowflakes start and grow.

A new study has found it is highly probable that climate change is amplifying the north-south water runoff contrast in Europe.

Changing GP opening hours is unlikely to ease the rising burden of A&E visits.

4. Quantifier

We found relict-only sites on almost all landform types.

In Indonesia, many patients are diagnosed with breast and cervical cancers at a very late stage.

Importantly, most reports showed complete or partial remission rates higher than 80 percent.

5. Verb + that or + noun phrase

Current evidence indicates that tiotropium demonstrates significant additional benefits.

Our research suggests that beliefs about race take a long time to develop.

Our new study indicates a link between the Wnt pathway and autophagy.

6. Verb + infinitive

Each of these policies appears to promote better resource allocation.

Diet is believed to play a role in cancer risk.

But moral principles seem to be playing an important role in the explanation of official behavior.

The new generation of asset lockups tends to involve intangible assets.

7. Modal verb

Dyslexia could be the result of eye spots that confuse the brain.

Adolescent drinking may cause liver problems later in life.

Instructional tools that address these cognitive variables should result in improved learning by the student.

Websites

Explanations

Explanations with activities

Activities

Ebooks

Information

Opening hours

The Resource Centre is still open for INTO students and staff.

It is not currently staffed. If you borrow something, please write the details on the borrowing form on the staff desk.

If you have a question, please email into.library@uea.ac.uk or talk to the staff on INTO Reception.

Loans

INTO students and staff can borrow up to 8 items (books, DVDs, etc.) at a time for 4 weeks.

Items may be renewed indefinitely, so long as nobody else wants them.

Printing, copying and scanning

See UEA's web page

Newspapers and magazines

The Guardian, i [newspaper], Eastern Daily Press
These newspapers are not being delivered at present.
The Economist, New Scientist, Time, National Geographic
Contact

Resource Centre, INTO University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ

01603 592740 (Resource Centre)
01603 592977 (INTO Reception)

into.library@uea.ac.uk

Classification

Outline of the Resource Centre's subject classification scheme

Catalogue

News posts

Leaflets

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Search Results for "listening " - intouea.com

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This is the generic syllabus of the English Language Support Programme (ELSP) for UEA students. It has the theme and learner outcomes for each session. Online activities are gradually being added to the programme. Look for the Extra activities links. For more information, see the ELSP page on the UEA website.

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Being Cautious

Being Critical

Classifying and Listing

Compare and Contrast

Defining Terms

Describing Trends

Describing Quantities

Explaining Causality

Giving Examples

Signalling Transition

Writing about the Past

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The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ). Other phrases are listed under the more general communicative functions of academic writing (see the menu on the left). The resource should be particularly useful for writers who need to report their research work. The phrases, and the headings under which they are listed, can be used simply to assist you in thinking about the content and organisation of your own writing, or the phrases can be incorporated into your writing where this is appropriate. In most cases, a certain amount of creativity and adaptation will be necessary when a phrase is used. The items in the Academic Phrasebank are mostly content neutral and generic in nature; in using them, therefore, you are not stealing other people's ideas and this does not constitute plagiarism. For some of the entries, specific content words have been included for illustrative purposes, and these should be substituted when the phrases are used. The resource was designed primarily for academic and scientific writers who are non-native speakers of English. However, native speaker writers may still find much of the material helpful. In fact, recent data suggest that the majority of users are native speakers of English. More about Academic Phrasebank.

Call for research participants
Are you a postgraduate student with a specific learning difficulty? We are conducting research into how Academic Phrasebank can be useful for postgraduate students who have specific learning difficulties. Would you like to assist with this project by taking part in an online interview? If so, please complete thisshort form. It will only take around one minute of your time.

This site was created by John Morley.

Academic Phrasebank is the Intellectual Property of the University of Manchester.

Copyright © 2023 The University of Manchester

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The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ).

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Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students(From Penn State)

The Science of Scientific WritingGeorge Gopen, Judith Swan
American Scientist, Vol. 78 (Nov-Dec 1990), pp. 550-558.

Scientific Writing for a Popular Audience(From Duke Writing Studio)

Publish Not PerishThe Art & Craft of Publishing in Scholarly Journals
(From University of Colorado)

Marc E. Tischler's Scientific Writing Booklet

Writing up research: The Guidebook(From the Language Center @ The Asian Institute of Technology)

Online Writing Lab: Medical Writing(From Purdue University)

Writing CommonsA free, comprehensive, peer-reviewed, award-winning Open Text for students and faculty in college-level courses that require writing and research.

Getting Published GuideLinks to EndNote, RefWorks, copyright information and various tools to assist those authoring manuscripts and papers.

Grants InformationA listing of databases, Web, and print resources with funding and contracting opportunities.

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How to read research critically - an introduction

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How to read research critically - an introduction

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How to read research critically - an introduction

Aims

Page 1 of 1

Adapted from the Open University's SAFARI tutorial by Cardiff University, with permission from the Open University Library.

Copyright © Cardiff University, 2006; all rights reserved.

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How to read research critically - an introduction

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Aims Page 1 of 1 Adapted from the Open University's SAFARI tutorial by Cardiff University, with permission from the Open University Library. Copyright © Cardiff University, 2006; all rights reserved.

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Welcome to the Information Literacy Resource Bank, Cardiff University Library Service's integrated microsite for our digital and information literacy resources.

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Choosing quality sources for your academic work

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Choosing quality sources for your academic work

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Choosing quality sources for your academic work

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Tutorials and learning activities on the topic of avoiding plagiarism.

To use an individual resource in your teaching materials (in accordance with the terms of the licence), either link to it directly via the Preview button or click on the file download button. Cardiff University students can also access tutorials and some other resources via the Study Skills section of the Intranet.

Resource title and description

Type

Why, when and how: citing and referencing
This Xerte tutorial covers:

what citing and referencing mean, and why they are important

what plagiarism and collusion mean and what actions are viewed as plagiarism or collusion

how to use others' research in your own work

how to correctly cite and reference other's work using the style recommended by your School

You can find more information specifically relating to the Cardiff Harvard, MHRA and Vancouver referencing styles, including step-by-step tutorials here.
Tutorial

How to avoid plagiarism: 5 top tips
This video provides advice for students on common errors in citing & referencing and some tips on how to avoid charges of plagiarism. The video can also be found on YouTube. A transcript is provided.

Video

Plagiarism: why you should avoid it

Cardiff University lecturer, Dr Stephen Rutherford, talks about plagiarism and why you should avoid it.

A transcript is also available.

Video

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Tutorials and learning activities on the topic of avoiding plagiarism. To use an individual resource in your teaching materials (in accordance with the terms of the licence), either link to it directly via the Preview button or click on the file download button.

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Study Skills | Organisation & Time Management

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Author: Sheldon Smith ‖ Last modified: 28 November 2022.

Sheldon Smith is the founder and editor of EAPFoundation.com. He has been teaching English for Academic Purposes since 2004. Find out more about him in the about section and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Snapshots of the infographics which are available on EAPFoundation.com.

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Links for Writing and also other English Language Skills

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Complete books

Chapters

Develop your writing
Effective Study Skills, by Geraldine Price and Pat Maier

How to write an essay
The Smart Study Guide, by Louise Tamblin and Pat Ward

Techniques for academic writing
Study Skills for Part-Time Students, by Dorothy Bedford and Elizabeth Wilson

A toolkit for academic writing
The Smarter Student, by Kathleen McMillan

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Develop your writing Effective Study Skills, by Geraldine Price and Pat Maier How to write an essay The Smart Study Guide, by Louise Tamblin and Pat Ward Techniques for academic writing Study Skills for Part-Time Students, by Dorothy Bedford and Elizabeth Wilson A toolkit for academic writing The Smarter Student, by Kathleen McMillan

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Essential Tips for Searching with Google

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Essential Tips for Searching with Google

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Finding Information (for your academic work)

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Strategies for writing an effective Conclusion

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Strategies for writing an effective Conclusion

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Pick one of these seven strategies to write a strong conclusion paragraph that leaves a lasting impression of good writing.

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Here are some more:

https://quizlet.com/gb/415196113/cueapawl2-flash-cards/

https://quizlet.com/gb/414324260/cueapawl3-flash-cards/

https://quizlet.com/gb/415196833/cueapawl4-flash-cards/

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Start studying CUEAPAWL1. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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You have learned that when you are paraphrasing an author's idea, you must rewrite the ideas in your own words without changing the meaning. However, there may be some words in the original that cannot be rephrased without creating awkwardness. It is important for you to be aware of this and to be able to determine which words in an original passage will be unchanged in your paraphrase.

Here are some examples of categories of words that are difficult to paraphrase, especially if they are essential to the main idea of the passage.

*Specific numbers (Note: See the information elsewhere about paraphrasing statistics.)

*Proper names: including geographical locations, e.g. the Yangtze River, Himalayas, Hong Kong, the Philippines, etc.

*Organizations, e.g. the United Nations, Greenpeace, the FBI, etc.

*Names of (famous) people, e.g. President H. K. Chang, Jackie Chan etc. (Note:
If a person is famous and has a title, it is possible (but not required) to rephrase one by using the other. For example, " Xi Jinping" can be rephrased as " the President of the PRC ", or vice-versa.)

*Specific dates, e.g. 4th June 1999. (Note: When a date is not specific, it can often be paraphrased. For example, the sentence "I finished university in 1988" can be rewritten as "I graduated from university 10 years ago."

*Nouns (Note: In general, nouns are harder to paraphrase than verbs and adjectives because so many nouns refer to technical terms within a field or to common, concrete objects for which few or no synonyms exist.

*Terms within a field: e.g. environmental terms ( greenhouse effect, acid rain), chemical terms ( carbon dioxide), computer components ( mouse, printer), medical terms ( open-heart surgery, coma), political terms ( president, prime minister, socialism), economic terms ( interest rate, stock market)

*Common concrete objects: This is a difficult category as you must have a fairly large
vocabulary in order to determine which words have synonyms and which do not. For example,
the words that describe such concrete, everyday objects such as 'bed', 'chair', 'grass', and
'book' have very few common synonyms, while others, such as 'couch', 'store' and 'rain'do
( couch: 'sofa', store: 'shop', rain: 'precipitation', building: 'block').

(Note: While the individual words "bed" and "chair" may be awkward if paraphrased, it is possible to provide a generalization if both words are present in a passage, since "bed and chair" can be rephrased as "pieces of furniture.")
Keep practising as you will find that the more you do it, the easier paraphrasing becomes, and the more your English writing and vocabulary improves, too!

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Created with Hot Potatoes by Half-Baked Software, registered to Alan.

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You have learned that when you are paraphrasing an author's idea, you must rewrite the ideas in your own words without changing the meaning. However, there may be some words in the original that cannot be rephrased without creating awkwardness.

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Effective Discussions

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Asking questions and joining in discussions are important skills for university study. This part is intended for self-study. You will be shown a number of discussion strategies along with a wide range of useful expressions for a variety of situations you may encounter when discussing a topic.

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Language in a Seminar

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In a seminar format you will be expected to participate in the discussion. Preparing for a seminar requires that you do all of the assigned readings and make some notes to use in the discussion. The following list of phrases are commonly used in a seminar.

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Pick one of these seven strategies to write a strong conclusion paragraph that leaves a lasting impression of good writing.

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The power of a great introduction - Carolyn Mohr

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Reading Efficiently

The reading that you do for your studies is often different from the reading that you do for leisure. If you learn the correct technique for your reading goal, then you can save yourself time and ensure that you read efficiently and effectively for your essays, reports or tutorials. Use the following links to improve your reading skills:

Reading for leisure not only can help relax you, but it can also help enhance your academic reading, so why not read for fun?

Take a look at the information from the Library on Reading for Leisure.

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Reading efficiently | University Library - Students | Loughborough University

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The reading that you do for your studies is often different from the reading that you do for leisure. If you learn the correct technique for your reading goal, then you can save yourself time and ensure that you read efficiently and effectively for your essays, reports or tutorials.

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LibGuides: English for Academic Purposes (EAP/ESL): Writing Help

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Reading, writing, grammar, and listening/speaking support for all levels of non-native speakers of English.

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Reporting Verbs - Referencing & Citation

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Reporting Verbs - Referencing & Citation

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Schmidt (2010) describes the process of language acquisition.

Greenberg (2001) emphasises / highlights / stresses the importance of taking a liberal approach (gives particular importance to)

Kim (2005) demonstrates / shows how Bach's music draws considerably on earlier composer's work.

Source: Mccarthy, M & O'dell, F (2007) Academic English in Use, Cambridge

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Schmidt (2010) describes the process of language acquisition. Greenberg (2001) emphasises / highlights / stresses the importance of taking a liberal approach (gives particular importance to) Kim (2005) demonstrates / shows how Bach's music draws considerably on earlier composer's work.

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Reporting Verbs

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Reporting verbs, also known as referring verbs, are verbs which are used when you report or refer to another work. They are needed for in-text citations.

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Prewriting exercises provide structure and meaning to your topic and research before you begin to write a draft. Using prewriting strategies to organize and generate ideas prevents a writer from becoming frustrated or stuck. Just as you would prepare to give a public speech on note cards, it is also necessary to write ideas down for a rough draft. After all, your audience is counting on a well-organized presentation of interesting facts, a storyline, or whatever you are required to write about. Prewriting exercises can help you focus your ideas, determine a topic, and develop a logical structure for your paper.

Prewriting Exercises

Brainstorming: It's often helpful to set a time limit on this; plan to brainstorm for ten minutes, for example. This will help you focus and keep you from feeling overwhelmed. This is especially helpful when you're still trying to narrow or focus your topic. You'll start with a blank page, and you'll write down as many ideas about your topic as you can think of. Ask yourself questions as you write: Why am I doing this? Why do I like this? Why don't I like this? What is the most interesting thing about this field or issue? How would my audience feel about this? What can we learn from this? How can we benefit from knowing more? When time is up, read over your list, and add anything else that you think of. Are there patterns or ideas that keep coming up? These are often clues about what is most important about this topic or issue.

Freewriting: A time limit is also useful in this exercise. Using a blank piece of paper or your word-processing program, summarize your topic in a sentence and keep writing. Write anything that comes to your mind and don't stop. Don't worry about grammar or spelling, and if you get stuck, just write whatever comes to mind. Continue until your time limit is up, and when it's time to stop, read over what you've written and start underlining the most important or relevant ideas. This will help you to identify your most important ideas, and you'll often be surprised by what you come up with.

Listing: In this exercise, you'll simply list all of your ideas. This will help you when you are mapping or outlining your ideas, because as you use an idea, you can cross it off your list.

Clustering: This is another way to record your thoughts and observations for a paragraph or essay after you have chosen a topic. First draw a circle near the center of a blank piece of paper, and in that circle, write the subject of your essay or paragraph. Then in a ring around the main circle, write down the main parts or subtopics within the main topic. Circle each of these, and then draw a line connecting them to the main circle in the middle. Then think of other ideas, facts, or issues that relate to each of the main parts/subtopics, circle these, and draw lines connecting them to the relevant part/subtopic. Repeat this process with each new circle until you run out of ideas. This is a great way of identifying the parts within your topic, which will provide content for the paper, and it also helps you discover how these parts relate to each other.

Outlining Your Paper

An outline is a plan for the paper that will help you organize and structure your ideas in a way that effectively communicates them to your reader and supports your thesis statement. You'll want to work on an outline after you've completed some of the other exercises, since having an idea of what you'll say in the paper will make it much easier to write. An outline can be very informal; you might simply jot down your thesis statement, what the introduction will discuss, what you'll say in the body of the paper, and what you want to include in the conclusion.

Remember that all writing - even academic writing - needs to tell a story: the introduction often describes what has already happened (the background or history of your topic), the body paragraphs might explain what is currently happening and what needs to happen (this often involves discussing a problem, the need for a solution, and possible solutions), and the conclusion usually looks to the future by focusing on what is likely to happen (what might happen next, and whether a solution is likely). If you work on telling a story in the paper, it will help you to structure it in a way that the reader can easily follow and understand.

Sometimes you may be required (or you may want) to develop a more formal outline with numbered and lettered headings and subheadings. This will help you to demonstrate the relationships between the ideas, facts, and information within the paper. Here's an example of what this might look like:

Introduction

Fact that grabs audience attention

Background/history of issue/problem/topic

Thesis statement

Current state of issue/problem/topic

Topic/claim sentence: Make a claim that explains what the paragraph is about

Evidence that supports/explains the claim (this is often research from secondary sources)

Analysis that explains how the evidence supports your claim and why this matters to the paper's thesis statement

The need for a solution or course of action

Conclusion

What might happen now?

Is a solution likely?

What's the future of the issue?

Your outline will contain more detailed information, and if there are certain areas that the assignment requires you to cover, then you can modify the outline to include these. You can also expand it if you're writing a longer research paper: the discussion of the problem might need several paragraphs, for example, and you might discuss the pros and cons of several possible solutions.

Resources

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Prewriting exercises provide structure and meaning to your topic and research before you begin to write a draft. Using prewriting strategies to organize and generate ideas prevents a writer from becoming frustrated or stuck. Just as you would prepare to give a public speech on note cards, it is also necessary to write ideas down for a rough draft.

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Ideagen Huddle - secure cloud-based client portals | Ideagen

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Engage and develop trusted client relationships by bringing people, documents and actions together in one central and secure environment. Find out more.

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Writing skills

Writing at university can be a daunting task for many students. There is much to learn, such as different genres of writing ( reports, essays), how to write in an acceptable academic style, and paraphrasing and using references to avoid plagiarism. Despite the difficulties, writing can be made easier if you break the task down by following the writing process. The following pages will give you help on these aspects of writing, and more.

Like the website? Try the books. Enter your email to receive a free sample from Academic Writing Genres.

Author: Sheldon Smith ‖ Last modified: 22 January 2022.

Sheldon Smith is the founder and editor of EAPFoundation.com. He has been teaching English for Academic Purposes since 2004. Find out more about him in the about section and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Popular pages in the writing sectionMost viewed pages

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The Writing section covers different genres of writing such as reports and essays, how to write in an academic style, how to paraphrase and how to cite.

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Using English for Academic Purposes: Information, advice and practice for Students in Higher Education studying through the medium of English. The information on this site is displayed in frames.

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Using English for Academic Purposes: Information, advice and practice for Students in Higher Education studying through the medium of English. The information on this site is displayed in frames.

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Centre for Independent Language Learning 

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Centre for Independent Language Learning 

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Testing with a CILL Tutor Show or e-mail your writing to a CILL teacher at eccill@inet.polyu.edu.hk. It is very important to tell the tutor what you have been learning so that they can assess that. If you would like suggestions for other things to improve, please ask.

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PREPARE FOR SUCCESS
Study tips for students coming to study in the UK (Higher Ed)

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Prepare for Success is an interactive web learning tool for international students who are getting ready to come to the UK for study in further or higher education. It contains learning resources which are activity-based to help you find out about different aspects of academic life in the UK and the…

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GRAMMAR QUIZZES

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Grammar-Quizzes | Practice on Points of English Grammar (ESL/ELL)

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Improve and update your knowledge of English grammar with contrastive examples, modern descriptions, contexts, images, diagrams, quizzes, editing exercises.

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Academic English (EAP) teaching resources

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Resources for teaching IELTS and English for Academic Purposes (mostly EGAP and some ESAP) on pre-sessional and in-sessional courses. The resources cover a wide range of topics, from grammar to critical thinking to listening to lectures.

Please note that these resources are published here by kind permission of our former ELT contributors and that it may occasionally be necessary to remove a resource from the site at their request. Please also note that these resources are published in PDF format only. Any audio, interactive or adaptable materials referenced in the PDFs do not form part of this archive.

We use cookies to deliver functionality and provide you with a better service. By continuing to browse our site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out more.

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Academic English (EAP) teaching resources

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Resources for teaching IELTS and English for Academic Purposes (mostly EGAP and some ESAP) on pre-sessional and in-sessional courses. The resources cover a wide range of topics, from grammar to critical thinking to listening to lectures.