Pixel International Conferences

In order to successfully operate in the English-speaking academic environment students need a very particular set of language skills and vocabulary that differs from that of an everyday conversation. Their acquisition takes time, the resource that is often in short supply at the university. At the same time, students are expected to participate in seminars and submit essays that are on par with the university-level requirements from the very first semester of their studies.

A one-semester face-to-face Academic Writing course currently taught at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, cannot feasibly address all the issues and target individual student’s problems. To supplement it and to provide more space for practice, the BA Online Academic English Practice course was created. It is a one-semester fully online course that focuses on improving students’ writing and speaking skills by utilising a variety of Moodle functions and external services.

This presentation provides an overview of the course. It also addresses the common pitfalls of online courses, such as lack of motivation and insufficient learner autonomy, and demonstrates approaches to targeting them that have been applied in the course.