English for Academic Purposes

English Business Collocations

• annual • attention to
• chair • staff
• come to the • a deal
• draw your • partnership
• lay off • turnover
• go • a meeting
• make • a loss
• close • trading
• go into • point
• dismiss an • bankrupt
• launch a new • offer
• Cease • product

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 English for Academic Purposes
Your attitude to speaking English
I want to speak English with a perfect native-speaker

I want to speak English without a single grammatical mistake

I feel as though I am a different person when I speak English

My pronunciation is not as important as grammatical accuracy

If I can communicate my meaning effectively, it does not matter if I make mistakes

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 English for Academic Purposes

• it is linear, it is explicit, it has one central point

and it is presented in standard language.

• Academic spoken style is also similar in many

ways in that it is formal, explicit, hedged, and
responsible.
• However, it is less complex and objective than
written language.

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 English for Academic Purposes
• Sign post language: Introducing and transitioning
between points, sequencing
Introducing a new point:
What I’d like to focus on first of all is…..
So, let’s start by taking a brief look at……..
Indicating a transition:
Ok, moving on to….
So now that we’ve ……I’d like to look at….
So that was…..if we can now turn to …..
Indicating sequence or order:
What I would like to focus on first of all is .., we’ll then turn to.., and lastly we’ll
First of all we have…. And below that…then….After that comes…… followed by…
Next is …… then…. Finally this brings us to……
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 English for Academic Purposes

• Formal
• In general this means that when you are
speaking you should avoid colloquial words
and expressions.
• you should still avoid:
a. colloquial words and expressions; "stuff", "a
lot of", "thing", "sort of",
b. two word verbs: "put off", "bring up"
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 English For Academic Purposes
• Explicit
It is the responsibility of the speaker in English to make it clear to
the listener how various parts of the talk are related. These
connections can be made explicit by the use of different signalling
words.

• Precision
When speaking in an academic contexts, facts and figures are given
precisely.

• Hedged
In any kind of academic speaking you do, it is necessary to make
decisions about your stance on a particular subject, or the strength
of the claims you are making. Different subjects prefer to do this in
different ways.
A technique common in certain kinds of speaking is known by
linguists as a 'hedge'.
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 English for Academic Purposes
• Responsible
In academic speaking you are responsible for
demonstrating an understanding of the source
text. You must be responsible for, and must be
able to provide evidence and justification for, any
claims you make.
• Accuracy
Academic speaking uses vocabulary accurately.
Most subjects have words with narrow specific
meanings. Linguistics distinguishes clearly
between "phonetics" and "phonemics"; general
English does not.

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 English for Academic Purposes
• Less Complex
Spoken language is less complex than written language.
It has fewer subordinate clauses, fewer "that/to"
complement clauses, fewer sequences of prepositional
phrases, fewer attributive adjectives and more active verbs
than written language.
Spoken texts are longer = there is more repetition.
According to Ure (1971), the percentage of different words
in a text is generally below 40% for spoken texts and above
40% for written texts.
• have shorter, less complex words and phrases
• more verb based phrases
• a more limited vocabulary.
• lexically less dense
• more grammatical words than lexical words.
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 English for Academic Purposes
• more verb based phrases
(e.g. having treatment (W), being treated (S),
hospital care (W), go to hospital (S))
• more predicative adjectives
(misleading statistics (W), statistics are
misleading (S))
• more pronouns (it, they, you, we)
• more lexical repetition
• more first person reference (I)
• more active verbs than written language
• fewer complex words and phrases

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 English for Academic Purposes
Spoken texts are:
• more fragmented - more simple sentences and more use of
coordination and, but, so, because rather than
subordination (embedding)
Halliday (1989, p.79) compare
Written text:
• The use of this method of control unquestionably leads to
safer and faster train running in the most adverse weather
conditions.

spoken variant:
• If this method of control is used trains will unquestionably
(be able to) run more safely and faster (even) when the
weather conditions are most adverse

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 English for Academic Purposes
You can control the trains this way and if you do that you can
be quite sure that they'll be able to run more safely and
more quickly than they would otherwise, no matter how
bad the weather gets.
• The main difference is the grammar, not the Vocabulary.
Another example from (Halliday, 1996, p. 347).

Obviously the government is frightened of union reaction

to its move to impose proper behaviour on unions.

is more lexically dense than the spoken version:

• Obviously the government is frightened how the unions

will react if it tries to make them behave properly.
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