English language

UWE Bristol offers support to all students to meet their academic language and communication needs. We run workshops to help international students communicate effectively in English. These workshops are also suitable for other students if English is not your first language.

We provide a series of one-hour workshops for any level of international student, or any student who uses English as a second or additional language.

Workshops include:

• Communicating with your lecturers
• Improving sentence structure
• Learning Vocabulary: word forms, word meanings and words in context
• Pronunciation
• Taking part in discussions
• Tenses in academic writing
• Understanding new vocabulary in your reading
• Writing academic English: being cautious
• Writing academic English: being formal

These workshops are available to book online.

View English language workshops

We’ve created online workbooks and interactive recordings for some of our workshops. These are perfect if you can't make it to the sessions, prefer to work at your own pace, or would like to recap a workshop you have attended:

• Pronunciation - the sounds of English
• Tenses in academic writing
• Writing in an academic style

The Global Student Support Team, together with library staff, run regular events focusing on different themes including culture, home study, English language and more.

View Global Cafe events

• Academic Phrasebank (The University of Manchester)
  Useful academic phrases and sentence structures to improve your writing. Includes examples for a variety of general language functions, such as being critical, comparing and contrasting, and describing trends.
• British National Corpus (Brigham Young University)
  Check your use of English: how does it compare to examples and is it correct?
• The Academic Word List (AWL) (EAP Foundation)
  Useful academic vocabulary that frequently appears in academic texts.
• Formal and Informal English (engVid.com)
  A list of words and phrases to help you recognise the formal (academic) and informal ways of saying the same thing.

Improving your English

• Learning English: activities for learners (Cambridge English)
  Activities to help you to practise your English. Choose the skill you want to practise and the level that is right for you.
• English – practical literacy skills for adults (BBC Skillswise website)
  Includes factsheets, quizzes and practice activities.

• Grammar foundations (LinkedIn Learning)
  Video tutorials to help you apply the basic principles of grammar so you can avoid making the most common mistakes.
• Grammar tutorial (University of Bristol)
  Information and exercises to improve your understanding of grammar and punctuation.
• Grammarly
  A tool that checks your use of grammar, punctuation, contextual spelling and style.
• The Purdue OWL: Grammar (Purdue University)
  Resources to help you use correct grammar in your writing.

Study support specialists in your college may also provide one-to-one support.

If you have any queries, please contact the Library.

UWE Bristol have partnered with Studiosity, which provides a Writing Feedback service that enables you to get same-day feedback on a piece of writing, helping you to improve your writing skills. Connect Live is part of Studiosity and allows you to chat with a study specialist 24/7.

Studiosity