General English Development
The purpose of the General English Development (GED) Course is to:
- provide you with language that may be useful during your stay in Sheffield, i.e. ‘current everyday English’
- allow you to learn about a number of conventional British and University social practices
- extend your vocabulary and vocabulary learning skills
- develop your listening, reading, speaking and writing skills
Details of what you will learn on the course are given below, in Learning Outcomes.
The GED course syllabus is a `fixed core + negotiated syllabus´. This means that 30% of the course topics are fixed, while the other 70% of topics are negotiated between students and teacher.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of this course, you should be better able to:
Social situations
- Start, develop and close conversations
- Give your own opinion
- Disagree politely
- Use informal/formal register
- Discuss confidently with an academic tutor/supervisor
- Negotiate deadline extensions
- Write appropriate emails & text messages
- Understand conventions of etiquette
General:
During the course you will also have the opportunity to work on some of the following and be better able to:
- Use appropriate social & seasonal greetings
- Write notes & greeting cards
- Use common idioms
- Use common phrasal verbs
- Address socially sensitive topics politely
- Make complaints
- Understand slang/taboo language
- Talk about the future
- Understand the meaning of common affixes
- Read texts effectively to identify key points
- Read texts quickly for specific information
- Use language related to some of the following topics: genetics, political systems, world economics & globalisation, crime, modern family, ageing population, health, literature/film/music, youth culture etc