Free online courseEnglish for Academic Purposes

Course Description

Strengthen the English skills you need to succeed in academic study, from understanding complex texts to producing well-structured, persuasive writing. This free online course is designed for learners who want to feel more confident reading articles, identifying key ideas, and turning their understanding into clear written work that meets university expectations.

You will build smarter reading habits by learning how to spot a text’s main idea, follow logical organization, and make informed inferences when details are implied rather than stated. Along the way, you will expand your academic vocabulary through practical word-building strategies, including affixes, word formation, and collocations that make your writing sound more natural and precise. Instead of memorizing isolated terms, you will develop tools to understand unfamiliar words in context and choose language that fits formal academic style.

On the writing side, you will learn to plan and structure essays with clarity, using outlines, strong transitions, and a consistent writer’s stance. The course also helps you recognize bias, support claims with appropriate evidence, and communicate your position with an academic tone. You will practice writing more sophisticated sentences, improving flow with complex and compound structures, and developing paragraphs that are easy for readers to follow.

Academic integrity and accurate source use are also central. You will practice summarizing effectively, working with reported speech and quotations, and selecting reporting verbs that communicate meaning responsibly. As you progress, you will gain strategies for addressing counterarguments and writing more persuasive and comparative essays, including point-by-point organization that strengthens analysis. By the end, you will have a repeatable writing process you can apply to assignments, research-based tasks, and exam-style timed writing, with practice activities to reinforce each skill.