Lost? Use this guide to help you find what you need.

LSP127 Professional English lp3 VT21 (1.5 hp)

This course is offered by the department of Communication and Learning in Science. 

Contact details

• Kathy Strong Hansen, examiner: strong@chalmers.se 
• Carina Sjöberg Hawke, instructor: carsjobe@chalmers.se 

It is best to contact the instruction team via email, and we request that you include the course number (LSP127) so that we can more quickly recognize what course you are in (as we teach several courses with similar names).

Course purpose

The purpose of the course is to prepare the students to use English as a working language by focusing on a number of professional situations which the students are likely to meet in their future working life and that are likely to demand a high level of English proficiency and good communicative skills in speech and writing. The course focuses on enabling students to write professional texts in English.

Course design

This course relies primarily on workshops, with material also supplied through lectures.The course includes both written and oral exercises. Written exercises include for example writing a popular science text, an abstract analysis, and material for a job application. Oral exercises include an oral presentation of, for example, a group text, and class discussions.

The course is organized in lectures and workshops of two, three, or four hours over the course of study period 3.

When a section of the activities in a course is labeled as "Lecture," that element will be recorded and then housed on the page devoted to that session. We ask that, whenever possible, you keep your cameras on during each Zoom session to help make the sessions as interactive, lively, and personable as possible.

Schedule

While you are welcome to access TimeEdit, see the Canvas calendar for the most up-to date information about locations and/or schedule changes; the schedule below will also be useful to you. For the schedule of reading and assignment due dates, see the course calendar and the information for each session in the module page.

All course literature can be found on the page for each course meeting under "course sessions." The course schedule gives details about when to read assignments. The Zoom link for the course is a reccuring one (the same link is used for all sessions) and can be found via the "Zoom" option in the menu to the left.

Changes made since the last occasion

Minor changes have been made to the course in response to previous course evaluations, including: the abstract analysis activity has been restructured to fit better within one course session, and the use of the larger writing project has been clarified. The largest change is that the course is run entirely online as a response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Material about making presentations in an online platform has therefore also been added.

Learning objectives

After completion of this course, the student should be able to:

• prepare relevant documents for a project, e.g. a communicative text for a general audience, an abstract;
• adapt and present information for oral communication contexts; and
• make a good impression in job applications.

Examination form

Compulsory written and peer review assignments as well as an oral presentation should be passed. The course is graded Pass/Fail, and all individual elements listed below are graded Pass/Fail. For more information about each assignment, please see the module devoted to that assignment.

Note that missing any session for which there is a compulsory assignment requires compensation. Compensation activities will be completed individually, not in groups.