Improve your written English: English language skills development in the form of a handbook – free of charge!

Are you an administrative employee at UCPH and do you often need to communicate with staff and students in English? Do you sometimes feel that communicating in English is more difficult and takes much longer than in Danish? In that case, we have some good news for you!

As of today, you can access our handbook ’Uses and Abuses of English – An English style guide for (Danish) university administrative staff’. The handbook has been written by Academic Language Consultant Pete Westbrook from the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use (CIP) – UCPH’s Language Centre - and will be freely available through CIP’s website.

Pete has been teaching English language skills to employees at UCPH for over 13 years, and during that time he has built up a large bank of teaching material specially tailored to administrative employees at the university. A hand-picked selection from that material has now been compiled into a handbook to serve as a reference and practice guide for those of you who use English in a professional university administrative context.

The handbook can help you improve both your written and oral English. The main focus is on the technical vocabulary you may need when working in a university administrative capacity, but you will also find sections on writing emails and giving useful tips on grammar. The handbook also contains a list of useful online tools which can help you improve your English language skills even further. The handbook uses authentic examples from university administrative communication and contains exercises to help you consolidate your English skills. In the back of the book, you will find a key to all the exercises.

’Uses and Abuses of English’ is not only a great tool for you as a UCPH employee, it is also written in a way to make it both easy and fun to develop your language skills.

If you are interested in reading the handbook yourself, you can download it for free here.

If you feel you need a somewhat bigger push to enhance your English language skills, you can also sign up for one of our English courses for employees. 

You can see a list of current courses in our course catalogue, or you can call or write us an email if you need further information. Please note that all our courses are subject to a fee and that your participation must be approved by your manager.