Drs. C. E. (Ineke) Smit is available for personal advice geared to your particular language problems, and also offers a selection of mini courses and seminars. The focus is on those hazards that Dutch academics find particularly difficult, but students of other nationalities will certainly also benefit from the programme.  

These courses are short, sharp shocks, strictly supportive and not intended to replace the much longer writing and presentation courses offered in the various local and national research schools, or the Academic Language Centre. In most cases little or no preparation is required, but see the individual course descriptions.

Dates and times may sometimes be arranged in consultation, and it is always possible to put in a special request for a course to be offered, if you can get a minimum of four prospective participants together.

Mini course; two sessions
The main focus in this short course is on content and structure of a very short talk, but the skills learned here can also be applied to longer presentations. Participants will receive extensive feedback, including a video clip of their own performance. The course requires some preparation for the second session, when all participants have to deliver their talks.

An acceptable level of proficiency in spoken English is necessary; please contact the instructor for more information.  


Next sessions:
To be announced.

Participants are required to attend both sessions.
Maximum number of participants: 6.

One two-hour session
In an informal setting, attention will be given to cultural differences in various aspects of conference behaviour (chairing a session, networking, etc.). The seminar is not about how to present a paper, but aims to offer students a modest but effective platform for speaking English more freely, also on other topics than their own research.

Maximum number of participants: 6
For PhD candidates only.

Next session: 
To be announced.

Mini course; two sessions
This short course focuses on the specific problems Dutch academics face when writing in English. Topics covered include the use of verb tenses, paragraph length and coherence, punctuation, hedging strategies, and more, tying in with participants' specific problems and needs. The course is specifically concerned with writing at sentence level, and does not address questions of over-all structure such as ‘what do I put in the Introduction?’ or ‘where does my literature review go?’ – these issues are often discipline-related, and are usually taken care of in the writing courses provided by the institutes themselves. There will be some in-class exercises, and participants will be asked to send in a short sample of their own writing, so that individual problems may be addressed.   

Maximum number of participants: 8

Next session:  

Dates	Monday 6 February, 2012 Monday 13 February, 2012
Time	9-11am
Location	Room 1.A03

 

Mini course; two sessions, together with Prof. Christine Espin
Academic life does not exclusively consist of writing articles and teaching – in order to get your article published, arrange for hotel accommodation at that conference, or get a job at all, there’s a lot of requests, applications and other kinds of text writing involved. You email journal editors; you are asked to ‘write a profile of yourself’, to be placed on your Institute’s web page; you have to have an English CV, and so on.

This kind of writing is essentially different from what is required when you write an article. For one, these texts are much shorter, and in the case of  CVs and web texts often need a sort of telegram style which in English is quite different from what you would do in Dutch.

In this course we will look mainly at how to write a well-organized CV, and what mistakes to avoid when writing  emails – for instance to  that Important Professor, asking  for a traineeship. If there is time the specific requirements for  writing an accessible web text will be addressed. Attention will be paid to the correct use of academic terminology, specifically how to use Dutch academic titles in English texts – if at all. If appropriate, the cultural context may occasionally be broadened to include other English-speaking countries than UK and USA. 

Seminar; one two-hour session
Where do I put ‘only’? Can I start a sentence with ‘also’? This is a more in-depth treatment of the subject than is offered in the mini course Pitfalls for Dutch writers of Academic English, and so will also be of interest to those who already took that course.

Next session:

Date	Monday 20 February, 2012
Time	9-11am
Location	Room 1.A03

Maximum number of participants: 8