Abbey DLD Group of Colleges | London

English

The Academic IELTS courses aim to provide comprehensive and tailored preparation for the IELTS exam, as well as the wider academic and general use of English at both the college and university thereafter.

With the exam tasks and required skills paramount (students must achieve a minimum of 6.5 before they have the option of leaving the course), varied topic based courses are run following an integrated skills approach.
As much as possible, topic areas and materials used are chosen with both the exam level needs and students’ interests taken into account.

Established IELTS materials are used alongside the creative use and exploitation of authentic resources such as television and radio programmes, the internet, newspaper articles and magazines such as ‘The Economist’, ‘The Week’ and ‘Time’.

Varying the materials not only allows students to familiarise themselves with the exam requirements, develop their skills and build confidence but it encourages them to further their language abilities generally, allowing for a greater flexibility and ease of use.

Aims of the English Department

•    To provide students with a complete preparation course in all IELTS exam tasks and requirements.

•    To help develop students’ language skills and linguistic knowledge to score 6.5 or above in the exam.

•    To help develop students’ language skills and linguistic knowledge to make significant progress in any general English course they may follow.

•    To develop students’ English and study skills (such as note-taking, planning and structuring work) to be of cross subject help.

We are here to provide linguistic support in all their subjects.
Our experience in teaching English as a foreign language, EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) provides us with a range of teaching and learning skills which can be applied in all subjects.

It is also our aim, therefore, to support the teachers of other subjects in their teaching of international students and as such we are developing our ‘Content and Language Integrated Learning’ (CLIL) capabilities through a co-ordinated programme of cross departmental co-operation.

We want to build students’ confidence and make learning English not only worthwhile but stimulating and enjoyable.
We are very aware of our crucial support role in the academic and social experience of students in both the college and England as a whole.

Departmental Structure

The department currently has 3 members of staff:

Jonathan Pratt     (Head of English)
Louise Hunt         (Senior Tutor / English)
Rupert Browett     (English)