Academic competences

1. Can you read these texts and summarise the main points?

Vivian Cook: Going Beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No.2, Summer 1999

Jonathan Culler: Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative
From Narrative Theory. Ed. Mieke Ball. Routledge, 2004

2. Are you able to write a seminar paper of this standard or better? These papers were written by Joint Programme students, they received the top grade and they have not been revised.

Cultural Studies
Linguistics

3. Are you able to understand this lecture and this discussion with ease and take notes?

TedTalk: Patricia Kuhl, Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington, shares her research findings about how babies learn one language over another.

https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies/up-next

Discussion programme taken from the BBC Radio 4 series “In our time”. Melvyn Bragg discusses “Victorian Pessimism” with Dinah Birch, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool; Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Peter Mandler, University Lecturer and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

First broadcast on 10 May 2007

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007d9k6

Comment: In this Master’s programme, you will be expected to work independently with academic sources and to be able to write good quality academic papers. You should therefore be familiar with conventions of academic writing including referencing conventions. You should also be willing to acquire research skills. One of the main problems encountered by students in this programme relates to their writing ability, and it is essential that you have a good standard of written English from the outset and are prepared to work on improving your writing skills.