Frequently asked questions

Skills development: The AWC can help you understand the linguistic and structural features of English-language articles. We provide courses and workshops tailored to your goals and needs, allowing you to improve your writing skills and effectively apply what you learn to your article. Study our current semester's program and register for the sessions that best suit you.

Collection of useful resources: Our extensive selection of electronic resources is designed to assist you throughout the writing process. From informative podcasts and curated links to useful materials, to a comprehensive library of AI tools, you’ll find everything you need to refine your academic writing skills. Additionally, if you work at one of the Moscow campuses, our library of academic writing resources is available for your use.

One-on-one consultations: If you already have a draft, you can discuss it during a one-on-one consultation. Our consultants will not only help you identify language inaccuracies but also enhance the logic, structure, and clarity of your text, ensuring it meets the requirements of international journals.

Explore our website: Begin by navigating our website, which provides comprehensive information about our past and upcoming projects, as well as the program of events for the current semester.

Choose your learning format: Depending on your current needs, you can select the most relevant format for your development:

• If you're ready to invest time in long-term projects, consider enrolling in one of our free courses. Choose a program that aligns with your needs, goals, and language level, and submit your application.

• If time is limited, but you're eager to learn something new, our workshops might be perfect for you. We offer a variety of topics each semester— select the ones that interest you and register.

Individual consultations: If you have a draft of an article, consider signing up for an individual consultation.  Our consultants will not only help you identify language inaccuracies but also assist you in enhancing the logic, structure, and clarity of your text, ensuring it meets the requirements of international journals.

Attend the AWC Welcome Day: A great way to get acquainted with the AWC is by attending the AWC Welcome Day at the beginning of each academic year. This event features a series of short workshops covering various topics related to research writing, publishing in international journals, and international academic collaboration. These workshops are led by HSE colleagues from diverse disciplines who have relevant experience and are willing to share it. Each workshop is run twice, allowing you to attend as many different sessions as you would like.

We can offer various options for collaboration for specialists in writing, trainers, writing center staff, and researchers from other institutions:

• Participation in the Center’s internship to exchange experience and prepare an individual project. 

• Conducting a workshop, course or school on academic writing

• Preparation and implementation of a collaborative project 

• Publication of blogs or working materials 

We are also open to your ideas and suggestions.

We value our participants’ opinion and encourage them to fill out the feedback form after each event. You can rate the event, specify what was useful for you, and suggest improvements. You can also leave any additional comments, suggestions, and requests.   

Yes, we offer a series of workbooks for self-study. These materials were designed by our trainers specifically for HSE faculty and researchers. You are welcome to take them for free in our office.

Additionally, we have a big library of textbooks and manuals on academic English, writing, various academic genres, and more. You can work with them in the Center in a comfortable environment. 

Welcome to our office: 11 Pokrovsky Boulevard,  Building G, Room G505, from 10 AM to 7 PM. 

No, we do not sell materials. However, we have many resources (books and textbooks) that you can use for free. Come to the AWC office and work with an extensive library of teaching materials. And if you would like materials that you can take with you, we offer a range of self-study workbooks. You are always welcome in our office: 11 Pokrovsky Boulevard, Building G, Room G505, from 10 AM to 7 PM. 

Participating in consultations will help you improve your written and spoken language, provide deeper understanding of your problems, and help you master the skill of writing coherent texts in English.

You can choose one of the two formats:

• Fluent Flow Format: focused on developing your speaking skills and preparing for a presentation, talk etc.

• Writing Consultations: focused on developing your writing skills and enhancing your text.

While AI can certainly generate text based on templates and algorithms, it’s essential to question the quality of these outputs. AI is most beneficial during the preparatory stage of writing. However, the true originality and creativity can only come from the study's author. Collaborating with a consultant allows you to discuss your ideas, explore ways to enhance your text, and correct any errors. This process not only clarifies your writing but also helps improve your English skills. If you’re interested in learning more, we recommend reading the related article.

Consultations are free for HSE staff. The university covers the cost of the consultant's services

The consultation lasts for 60 minutes. It is conducted online via Skype, using Google Docs. If you are interested in a face-to-face meeting, you can arrange this through our manager.

Full time HSE employees - faculty and researchers. 

If you are not a faculty member or researcher, but you are writing a research paper and are affiliated with HSE University, you can also use the consultation service. Postgraduate students of HSE University will need a recommendation from their research supervisor.

No, we don’t offer proofreading services. Consultations are an educational service and require the author’s active participation. Our service is aimed at enhancing faculty and researchers’ academic writing skills, not at editing papers

Consultations go beyond merely correcting mistakes. You discuss the text, identify logical inconsistencies, and improve the language design. This allows you to make your work more structured and clear. Additionally, the consultant considers your target audience, enabling you to tailor your writing effectively for your readers. 

Reading your text aloud helps you perceive it as a reader, notice mistakes, and hear how your writing sounds. This practice encourages you to slow down, view your work from a fresh perspective, and evaluate how clearly, accurately, and coherently you have expressed your ideas. Consultation also assists you with pronunciation and the effective use of pauses, which can indicate where a comma should be placed.

You will be working together in a joint document, so either of you can make corrections. We recommend that you should discuss it beforehand and decide together who feels more comfortable making edits to the document.

Yes, the consultant is your first reader. He can give feedback on what seems illogical or unclear. Together you can find better wording or restructure the text.

No, the AWC does not issue such documents because the consultation service is not proofreading. Its primary goal is enhancing authors’ writing skills and providing linguistic support.

You may work on a colleague's text only if you are a co-author.

To sign up, please follow the link and register through the MyHSE Services Account (ЕЛК).

Yes, you are welcome to bring texts of various genres, including monographs. We recommend carefully studying specific requirements of the publisher.

We request that you limit your consultations to 2-3 per week and no more than 8 per month. This policy helps ensure equal access to our services for all users. If your text is particularly lengthy, and you find that you need more consultations than allowed, please reach out to the AWC manager to discuss the possibility of scheduling additional time.

If you need to cancel or reschedule your consultation, please notify the AWC manager at least 2 business days in advance of your appointment. If you have to cancel it within 24 hours of your scheduled time, we encourage you to find a substitute, such as a colleague who may benefit from the consultation. Please note if a consultation is canceled with less than a day's notice, the fee will still be charged, as the university incurs financial losses as a result.

If you find yourself in urgent need of a consultation and no slots are available, please reach out to the AWC manager. We will do our best to find additional time provided that consultants are available. 

All AWC consultants are highly qualified specialists. Among them are native speakers from different countries and bilinguals. We encourage you to have consultations with each of them to understand which approach works best for you.  

No, you can bring your text at any stage of your writing. The consultant can provide recommendations on the typical issues that you can address in your next revision. Additionally, we recommend using the “Editing/Proofreading tools” from our e-library to enhance the effectiveness of your consultation.

It will save you time and effort. Each journal has specific requirements concerning text length, structure, citation style, illustrations, and bibliography. By preparing your text in the required format from the start, you can streamline the revision process.

It is very important because spelling and punctuation vary from one English language variant to another. It is necessary to clarify the requirements of the journal in advance and be use one variant consistently. see about punctuation, about spelling.

We encourage you to check out our collection of helpful resources. Here you can find links to resources to help you work on your mistakes. 

Staff employees of HSE University who have an official permanent contract with the university as their primary employer. Our target audience is the faculty and researchers. However, we can admit staff employees with other positions (e.g. administrative staff, research assistants, etc.) in case there are places in the group available and on condition that they fully explain in the motivation letter how they will benefit from this course.

If there are places in the group, we can also admit non-staff employees (whose primary place of employment is elsewhere) and Ph.D. students. Participants from these categories take full part in the course, but do not receive a certificate of completion. 

We ask all Ph.D. students who would like to enroll in our courses to provide a letter of recommendation from their academic advisor.

Yes, AWC course participants who have successfully completed the course receive a certificate of completion. AWC certificates are accepted as proof of professional development when you apply for a faculty or researcher position at HSE University.

NB: We only issue certificates for courses that amount to 16 or more academic hours.

We offer a variety of course formats and lengths: online, blended, and face-to-face courses; courses with synchronous, asynchronous, and / or individual work; courses that last from 8 academic hours up to 40 academic hours and from one day to six weeks. See the course syllabi here.

A: We have a number of programs for those who are starting to write academic texts in English and whose CEFR level is B1/B1+. However, the majority of AWC courses are targeted at participants who are independent or proficient users of English (B2 and above CEFR levels). See the course syllabi here.

The schedules and syllabi of all courses running in the current semester are available on the AWC website. We post information about all events in the spring semester at the end of December, and about events in the fall semester - at the end of August. See the course syllabi here.

The webpage of each course contains its brief description, the trainer’s brief bio, and a link to the course syllabus. We recommend that you should read the syllabus carefully as it has such information as course objectives, topics covered, dates and times of synchronous sessions, tasks and assessment, and a list of resources. See the course syllabi here.

If you still have questions after reading the syllabus, please contact us at nfedorova@hse.ru. We are always ready to answer your questions. 

The first thing to do is read the course syllabus carefully. Are the course objectives aligned with your personal goals? For example, if your goal is to improve your grammar, and the course is focused on the article structure, this course hardly meets your needs.

Also, you should pay attention to the course requirements. For instance, some courses require ongoing research while others may be targeted at researchers from certain disciplinary fields. And it is certainly important to take the English level requirements into account. 

Another important criterion is how time-consuming the course is and how well its timetable will fit your own schedule. If you realize that your workload will prevent you from completing all course tasks, and you will likely have to drop out, you should consider waiting for a better time to enroll.

On each course’s webpage, you can find a link to the registration form. To apply, you should carefully read the questions in the form and fill it out. Your submitted form is in effect your course application.

The main criterion for the selection process at the AWC is the motivation letter. Reading and analyzing applicants’ motivation letters helps us select participants with similar goals and proficiency in English. There are a number of reasons for that. First, a well-written motivation letter demonstrates that you are familiar with the course syllabus, understand the course objectives, and see how they can help you in your professional development. Second, your motivation letter reveals to what extent your research writing experience and skills meet the course requirements. Finally, a 250-word text allows us to evaluate your level of English in general and your writing skills in particular. 

On each course’s webpage. Besides, we have published a blog with our recommendations that can help you write a strong motivation letter. 

No, you can’t. We expect your motivation letter to explain how the syllabus of this particular course will help you with your personal and professional goals. As course syllabi differ from each other, each course requires a motivation letter written with this course’s content in mind.

5-7 days before the course, you will receive an email informing you whether your application has been accepted or rejected.

If you have been rejected on the basis of your motivation letter, you should definitely try to apply again. Our recommendations and our blog will help you write a better motivation letter next time. 

If you haven’t been accepted because you are not a staff employee at HSE University, we also recommend trying again next time. Our ability to admit non-staff employees depends on how many people have applied and how strong the competition is. It is likely that next time there will be places in the group for non-staff employees.

NB: Non-staff employees (whose primary place of employment is elsewhere) and Ph.D. students take full part in the course, but do not receive a certificate of completion.

Yes, many of our courses are highly rated by participants, which prompts us to run them on a regular basis. However, some courses appear on our program only once when we are afforded a unique opportunity to invite a leading expert in research writing.

No, you can’t. We do not accept applicants who have previously been admitted to the same course regardless whether or not they completed the course successfully the first time. Our mission is to offer professional development opportunities to as many colleagues as we can.

We constantly work on developing new course programs and offer new courses every academic year. 

Our courses differ in terms of how much time they take. All courses involve doing writing tasks as it is the only way to develop writing skills. You would hardly expect to learn to swim by listening to lectures about swimming, and the same principle applies to writing. If you expect to just attend lectures and stay passive, we don’t advise you to enroll for our courses. 

To understand how much time a course will take, please carefully read the course syllabus, which you can find on the course’s page. Course syllabi contain information about the number of hours you will spend studying and the amount of work you will be expected to do on the course. See the course syllabi here.

You can drop out of the course, but officially you will still be a course member. At the end of every course, we issue a credit report, and if you drop out, we will have to record it in the report as a fail. The credit report is an official document, which we are required to submit to the Professional Development Council. Your course performance record may be taken into consideration when you apply for a faculty position.

To avoid dropouts, we ask all selected candidates to confirm that they fully understand course requirements and are ready to allocate time for the course. We encourage you to look carefully at your workload and make sure it allows you to complete the course. If you are not sure, please inform us about this before the course starts so that we can offer your place in the group to another colleague.

Course assessment criteria vary and may include attendance, active participation during the sessions, task completion etc. The final grade is pass or fail. You can find final assessment criteria in course syllabi on our website.

It is usually up to the course trainer, but sometimes the trainer may consult the AWC team. The final assessment criteria are always outlined in the course syllabus and explained in detail in the materials provided by the trainer at the outset of the course. 

If you have a serious reason for not being able to complete the course successfully, we will certainly respect that and allow you to participate in other courses. However, if we see that you have failed the courses or dropped out of them repeatedly, we may find it reasonable to reject your application next time in favor of another candidate.

AWC workshops are open to a diverse audience, including educators and researchers from various research fields and backgrounds, both early-career and experienced. While many of the workshops may also appeal to master's and doctoral students, our primary target audience is HSE staff (regardless of their employment status). We frequently welcome colleagues from other universities as well.

Colleagues from other universities are welcome to attend our workshops. However, we kindly ask you to send them a link to the registration form. Completing the registration form is essential for us as it helps us collect data for our reports. These data are crucial both for planning events with the target audience in mind and for getting financing.

Students are not our target audience yet, but some topics may be relevant for master’s students.

On our website in the "Workshops" section. The dates and descriptions of all upcoming events are posted on our website in advance: for the fall semester at the end of August and for the spring semester at the end of December.

Not at all. In addition to various aspects of academic writing, we also discuss publication strategies, pronunciation and public speaking strategies, aspects of cross-cultural communication, academic collaboration and co-authorship, business correspondence conventions, and many other topics.

To get a full understanding of the range of topics, please follow the link to "Workshops" and scroll down to “Previous Workshops.”

Yes, we are delighted to receive such suggestions. We offer several ways for you to make suggestions about workshop topics:

• Feedback form 

After each workshop, you will receive a feedback form where you can suggest a topic of interest

• Annual survey 

Every January we conduct an annual survey among all our visitors, giving you another chance to voice your ideas about workshop topics

• Biennial survey 

The HSE Monitoring Center conducts a biennial survey, which also includes a series of questions about the Center’s activity.

Our speakers are academic English instructors who have experience of working with adult audiences. We also invite editors, reviewers, and authors of textbooks and courses on academic writing. Some of our speakers are experts in various research fields, fluent in English, and experienced in writing research articles in English. We take great care in selecting speakers, inviting only reputable professionals.

Yes, from time to time, we repeat the most highly rated workshops. However, 90% of the program is completely new every year to ensure variety and relevance. The selection of topics is driven by our target audience’s needs and interests, which we carefully study. Therefore, we make a decision about repeating a workshop based on participants’ feedback. 

Yes, if the workshop was held after 2020. Before that, all workshops were conducted face-to-face and were not recorded. Recordings of most of our workshops dating from 2020 and later can be found on our YouTube channel and VKontakte.

Please send your request to nfedorova@hse.ru, and we will do our best to assist you.

We record online workshops with the speaker's consent. The video recording is processed and is usually uploaded to our YouTube channel and VKontakte within 2-3 weeks. Subscribe to the channel to receive notifications about new content.

No, we conduct some workshops offline or in a hybrid format. Generally, at least one face-to-face workshop takes place each semester. 

Mostly in English, except those that are focused on Russian-speaking discourse. 

We do not have formal language level requirements for workshop participants. Participants’ level ranges from B1 to C2. However, as our workshops are held in English, we recommend that you should have at least B1 level (CEFR) to participate in the workshop effectively. 

You can receive the presentation by completing the feedback form (with the speaker's approval). At the end of the workshop, the moderator will share a link to the form in the chat. For face-to-face workshops, we will provide a QR code for easy access. 

No, it is not mandatory. However, we recommend turning on your camera if it is possible. It enhances communication with the speaker and colleagues. As educators, you surely understand the value of seeing human faces instead of black squares on the screen. 

Yes, you can. If this is the most convenient way for you, we completely understand. We recognize the challenges that educators and researchers face at the end of a workday. However, our workshops are designed to be interactive and hands-on. We believe that active personal involvement is the only way to develop new skills and gain knowledge. Our workshops give you an opportunity to take part in practical activities. Don’t miss out on the chance.

We are always delighted to welcome new speakers. If you have experience of writing and publishing in English, teaching or public speaking skills in English that your colleagues can benefit from, we would love to hear from you. In January, we conduct an annual survey among our visitors that includes questions about potential collaboration opportunities. So, feel free to share your ideas and suggestions. You can also send an email at ssuchkova@hse.ru. Your insights could make a significant impact.

Yes, we have a special project called Five-O’Clock Tea at the AWC, where you can participate in open discussions in English. The topics range from personal effectiveness to contemporary art. You can view the event schedule for this project here. 

Additionally, to enhance your speaking skills, we have developed a new format for individual consultations called Fluent Flow. A consultant will help you to rehearse your presentation, prepare for a lecture, and improve your pronunciation, clarity, and fluency. Detailed information and registration can be found here.