On the afternoon of October 26th, Prof. Hilary Nesi from the University of Coventry held a workshop on “Practical Ideas for Creating Teaching Materials for EAS / ESP Writing” in the teaching building room A310, and the host was Prof. Cao Xinyu, vice-dean of the College of Foreign Studies. All the public English teachers of our college participated in the workshop.

Prof. Hilary Nesi first asked three questions about why they want to read, how readers interact with writers and how to make this process connected to them, all of which triggered their thinking. Then, she introduced how to read academic articles from seven aspects, including understanding the authors, noticing reference sources and bibliography. Based on her own teaching experience, she noted that Chinese students have some problems when reading academic articles, and offered some suggestions. To improve teaching quality, Prof. Hilary Nesi introduced another topic on how to use the corpus. In the process of lexicography, students need to abstract useful examples from the corpus. However, there are large amounts of concordance lines, where people search common words and their collocations, which brings considerable difficulty for people to summarize the rules of using languages. Sketch Engine, an efficient language information and analysis tool is useful in this situation. Prof. Hilary Nesi gave instructions on how to use Word Sketch Engine£¨https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/£©for free material. Moreover, she introduced various kinds of interesting study methods to improve learning interests of students.

Teachers at the workshop were enthusiastic for Prof. Hilary Nesi’s speech, even though the workshop lasted more than two hours. During the workshop, Prof. Hilary Nesi put forward some topics for discussion, through which teachers got answers to their problems through communication and discussion. Teachers learned more about how to read academic articles and how to guide their students to read more efficiently.