Specific objectives

- developing students’ listening skills in an academic context so that by the end of the course they can produce summaries of academic lectures by taking notes and discriminating between main points and detail;

- developing students’ reading skills so that by the end of the course they are approximating the reading style of an educated native-speaker, varying their reading strategy according to text type and purpose, and are able to extract meaning in an efficient way from a range of English text types, especially  academic and literary texts;

- enhancing the fluency and accuracy of students’ speaking skills, especially those of  discussion, questioning and exposition required in an academic forum and formal registers;

- developing students’ writing skills; help them become comfortable with expressing their ideas on a range of general and academic topics coherently, using advanced grammatical structures and vocabulary in a variety of text types; developing academic integrity and compliance with academic style, both in composition and formatting;

- extending students’ knowledge of and ability to use appropriately advanced lexis; developing editing skills;

- helping students’ become autonomous learners aware of the learning strategies they can adopt inside  and outside the classroom to further their language learning;

- developing the study skills of students, such as note-taking, using the library and reliable Internet sources, which will contribute to their learning in content areas.

- developing critical thinking, problem-solving, independent research, academic writing and presentation skills.