Course "Writing a Research Paper in English. Advanced level"

Writing an English-medium research paper requires producing a strong publishable text. This new writing course helps you improve your writing skills one step further by highlighting the core aspects of a strong text. The key goal is to analyze how you actually write in terms of language use and meaning construction and, considering your strengths and weaknesses, make an action plan to advance your writing abilities. We will employ a text-oriented ethnographic approach to explore your writing skills; we will also learn how to use individually generated corpus and  AI services to assist you in writing. 

The course first covers the macro rhetorical aspects of the research paper genre by linking them to the disciplinary epistemologies and ways of making meaning and knowledge. Next, we explore the diversity of ways to rhetorically craft ideas at the level of subsections and paragraphs. Finally, we explore the diversity of sentence types, lexis, and linguistic mechanisms that can help you make your text linguistically stronger.

Trainer: Natalia Smirnova, Ph.D. in teaching English as a foreign language, Associate Professor, Head of the Foreign Languages Department at the HSE University in St. Petersburg. She has designed and taught courses in Research Writing, Writing for Publication, Rhetoric, Argumentation and Writing both for students and researchers. Natalia has a strong research interest in the social perspectives on writing, ESOL pedagogies, and writing assessment.

Dates: March 24 - April 14
Format: online

English level requirement: C1

How do I get accepted? The course is offered on a competitive basis. Please fill out an online registration form and write a motivation letter in English (about 300 words). Please describe your experience of preparing research articles in English and the difficulties you have faced. Explain how the course will help you overcome these challenges and how the new skills are relevant to your teaching and / or research. The motivation letter should clearly demonstrate that the applicant has read the course syllabus and is willing to make time to do all course tasks.