Category: Subjects at UMU

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This resource post is linked to Inglés Jurídico.

Most of the work you are required to accomplish during this semester is somewhat related to three different areas: Reading topic-specif texts, writing and preparing oral presentations and using easy ICT skills.You can find below some nece resources that will come in handy.

Reading topic-specif texts

Reference dictionaries are a key resource in learning a foreign language. This is my selection:

A general online monolingual dictionary: Cambridge online

Law online reference resources : Law.com, Legal dictionary, Nolo’s Everybody’s legal dictionary, and a collection of glossaries.

Writing and preparing oral presentations

When drafting and writing down your ideas, it is essential that you consider different areas of language.

Appropriatness

We say that something is appropriate when (1) it is frequent in terms of use, that is, readers or listeners will match their expectations of your discourse against what has already been said or written before and (2) your register fits in, that is, you are using the register that is appropriate in the communication, situational context. Some useful ideas are:

Check whether your words are actually used by speakers in sites published in the UK by seaching in Google and including site:.uk the search box. Say that you want to check wheterh “the constitutional tribunal of the UK” is used whatsoever. Ok type “the constitutional tribunal of the UK” and site:.uk, hit search and you get the following

which tells you that either nobody used the expression before (I don’t think so!). Here tha alternatives are two: it may be the case that your English is kind of broken (not the case here), or maybe you are using a string of words which means absolutely nothing to a native speaker ear. Why? Simple. There is not such a thing as a “constitutional tribunal of the UK”. Even if you just searched for “constitutional tribunal”

you’d get the following:

which in turn tells you that, yes, apparently you can say “constitutional tribunal” in English, but only in connection with a foreign country (Bolivia i.e.) and, certainly, very infrequently.

So, the bottom line is do some research before writing or preparing your presentation, it really pays off! It is naive to think that words can be put one after another, and still what you get is English. That ain’t working!!!!!

Using easy ICT skills

Using ICT skills is not a big deal these days. It is no longer an option. So if you are among the quitters’ group, you’d better do something abouit now. Ok. All you need to know about ICT is summarized here:

(1) Use a word processor to write and spell check your writing. You can type offline, save your stuff to a flash drive, and then upload to our wiki.

(2) Make the most of search facilities, web sites or add-ons such as Mozilla dictionaries and stuff like that, but, mind, never plagirize. If do you some nasty copy and paste and get caught you will be given 0% for your perfomance. Read the Department of English policy on plagiarism.

Pronunciation of English

This resource will be of great aid for those not faliliar with phonetic transcriptions: