English - Intensive Thesis Writers' Workshop C2

This course is aimed at students currently writing theses or dissertations. It combines group seminars with individual consultations. All sessions go beyond mere questions of “correct” grammar and word choice and emphasize instead stylistic guidelines for compelling and clear English writing at a high academic level. Discussions have a slight emphasis on strategies for German speakers but are appropriate to students from any language background. The individual sessions are tailored to the needs of each student.

After completion of this module, students will be able to express themselves with greater clarity and precision in written English. They will become more familiar with strategies for effective academic writing in English specifically, while gaining a sense for potential contrasts with their own native languages. Students will develop techniques to implement compelling sentence constructions, create cohesion within and between sentences, and render paragraphs coherent through specific semantic and syntactic choices.

Corresponds to C2 of the CER.

For students currently writing theses or dissertations in English. Ability to begin work at the upper C1 or C2 level of the GER, as demonstrated by a score above 75% on the English placement test at www.moodle.tum.de. Basic understanding of grammatical terms (e.g., parts of speech, subject, verb, object, active, passive, nominalization).

Seminars adopt a communicative and skills-oriented approach through group discussion, case studies, presentations, group work, etc. Individual sessions use students’ texts as the primary learning materials.

Handouts, presentations, audio-visual material, students’ own texts.

Handouts and selected extracts from published sources will be used in the course. Key literature will be advised by the teacher and/ or listed in the course description.

Performance, testing the learning outcomes specified in the module description, is examined by a cumulative portfolio of competence and action-oriented tasks. Students’ thesis-writing ability will be assessed based on their demonstration of clear improvements over the course of the workshop, showing that an effort has been made to implement the material discussed in class and the individual consultations with the instructor.