Open Sessions - Non Credit-bearing
What are these sessions?
These are English sessions that you can take in addition to your academic study. The sessions include input from the teacher, individual and group work and advice on how to continue with self-study after the session. The sessions take place in a lecture theatre and the number of places is only limited by the number of seats.
Who are these sessions for?
These classes are for all students or staff registered at Newcastle University whose first language is not English.
How do I register for these sessions?
You do not need to register for these sessions. You simply choose the sessions that you wish to attend and come to the room with your smart card. You can attend as many session as you choose.
Course details
Look at the course materials section of the website to see the weekly content of the Open Sessions and download useful documents.
Pronunciation
These sessions will look at all aspects of pronunciation with a particular focus on listening and speaking skills in an academic English context. There will be demonstrations and exercises to develop skills with individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress and intonation patterns. The sessions will also look at some elements of the Geordie accent and dialect.
Listening, Speaking and Culture
This course aims to provide a weekly opportunity for listening and speaking practice; to develop vocabulary and to develop knowledge of cultural issues and current events in the news. Using up-to-date video and audio extracts from web-based news, each session will focus on one or two topics. The topics will generally relate to world, UK or regional north east news. You will develop familiarity with the people, places and culture of the UK and the north east which will help with the process of cultural acclimatisation.
Grammar (and Vocabulary)
In each of these sessions, we will look at a short academic text which is performing a specific function; for example, describing a process or showing cause and effect. We will analyse the text to identify the grammatical structures and vocabulary items which are common in this type of text. Over the weeks, we will revisit some common grammatical features which occur in different kinds of texts and build up a bank of common academic vocabulary.
Each of these sessions will be dedicated to a single grammatical area; for example, relative clauses or noun phrases. There will be an introduction to the basics of the structure and before working through the most common and useful ways it can be used in academic situations. There will be practice exercises to help check your understanding as the session progresses.
Introduction to Academic Writing - What is Academic Writing? (First two weeks only)
This session aims to answer the question ‘what is academic writing?’. Looking at some of the features and conventions of academic writing, this session will give you an overview and an understanding of what makes academic writing different to other types of written and spoken English.
Introduction to Academic Writing - Using References and Avoiding Plagiarism (First two weeks only)
This single session aims to give you a clear understanding of this important aspect of academic writing. You will discover why we reference other people’s ideas and work in our own academic writing. You will also explore how to use references well to avoid plagiarism in your own writing. This will include looking at academic conventions as well as skills such as paraphrasing, summarising and reading critically.
What did the students say last year?
- 'The environment of the class is great, because it didn’t make me nervous to speak to other students.'
- 'It was surprisingly exciting and I felt really involved in the process.'
- 'It's good that we get to learn interesting things about the local region and culture at the same time as learning English.'
- 'There was a very good contact between teacher and students and the content of the programme was very good too covering up-to-date problems and introducing us to important issues in the UK (that is very important for international students).'
Is there anything else I need to know?
When attending a session, you should be prepared to discuss the topic of the session with students of other nationalities and cultures.
In these sessions, you must be respectful and tolerant of other students who will be different nationalities and may be different levels.
When attending a session, you should be prepared to listen to the views of others and encourage others to join in the discussion and debate whatever their level of speaking skills.
Due to the nature of these sessions, there will be little or no opportunity for individual feedback from the teacher.
If you have any questions, you can e-mail insessional@ncl.ac.uk
Course timetable
Semester 1 and 2 timetable information includes details about days, times and rooms.
