English for academic staff and students

Below, you can read more about academic language consultant Nina Nellemann Rasmussen's process and considerations when preparing an English course for academic staff or students.

"I teach a variety of academic English writing workshops and courses across the faculties at the University of Copenhagen. All my writing workshops and courses are tailored to the students’ specific needs and academic level and based on recent research in the field.

The writing workshop I taught in September 2019 is a very good example of one of CIP’s tailor-made and research-based products. I was asked to develop a 2-hour writing workshop for PhD students at the Department of Anthropology as part of a writing retreat. Anthropology is an extremely diverse field, spanning four very different yet interrelated fields of study: culture, linguistics, archaeology and biology. This means that there is enormous variation in the writing conventions across the field.

To ensure that the content of the workshop was suitably tailored to the participants’ needs, I familiarized myself closely with their respective research areas. Using published articles in the various sub-fields, I illustrated aspects of structure, style, writer’s voice and vocabulary. Drawing on my own extensive experience as a writing teacher, proofreader and editor of papers for publication, I centred my workshop around the areas that academic writers tend to find most challenging: sentence structure, clarity and general readability. Research has shown that these are also the most common causes of journal papers being rejected.

The workshop was a mixture of teacher presentation and student participation. It was highly interactive and featured a range of relevant exercises, concrete examples and useful tips and tools. The workshop was extremely well received, the students praising it for being “highly useful”, “extremely relevant”, “practical” and “concrete”. They also appreciated the useful tips and tools they were introduced to."