Welcome to the Postgraduate English Programme Blog. This site is for all postgraduate students at EMU, regardless of which courses you are taking. Please check in on a regular basis for news, announcements, and to explore the resources available. To receive automatic updates, submit your e-mail address below:
Friday, 31 December 2010
Happy New Year
Friday, 17 December 2010
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
YouTube
And with today's webcams and digital technology, you have some options in how you can make good use of YouTube and other such sites:
1) Rather than keep a Blog, you could keep a VLOG (Video-Log) as a study-research diary. This would help improve your oral fluency and act as a useful check mechanism to see if you really understand what you're studying or researching.
2) Video presentations can be uploaded into YouTube.
3) Video presentations and Video CVs are becoming more common. They can be stored on YouTube (or elsewhere) and linked from your website or Blog.
One warning about YouTube: It does periodically get closed down in some parts of the world (rather pointlessly since it is always possible to access it through a proxy server).
Monday, 22 November 2010
Surveys, Forms and Questionnaires
Sunday, 21 November 2010
GOOGLE Documents
GOOGLE Docs is simply Google's answer to MS Office. It's not as sophisticated, but it's flexible, and its online storage mechanism means you can access your documents anywhere you go, not to mention share them with as many or as few people as you choose.
Some people make back-ups of their Office documents in GOOGLE docs to guard against theft, loss, and failure of their computers and storage devices.
GOOGLE Docs also has a wealth of templates, e.g. for reports, cvs etc.
Saturday, 20 November 2010
GOOGLE Sites
Friday, 19 November 2010
Blogger
Four reasons to consider keeping a Blog.
i) A great medium to keep a research and study diary.
ii) A simple way of improving your writing fluency.
iii) A possible medium for gathering and presenting your work to a public audience.
iv) A possible medium for organising a portfolio of your achievements for future employers.
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Picasa
What has this got to do with postgraduate English you may ask?! Not a lot, possibly; but images you may use in your research work may find a place here (and a unique URL you can use); and one day you might find that a professional / research album of some type may come in very handy in research work (e.g. presentations) and when applying for employment.
As we'll discuss later, traditional methods of applying for jobs through old-style cvs are very much being overtaken by technological developments.
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
I-GOOGLE
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
GOOGLE Reader
Monday, 15 November 2010
Blog Searches
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Video and Image Searches
1) There is no reason as such why you can't use these sources in research.
2) Material is often copyrighted, and if you use it, you must reference it.
Check out the APA website to check on referencing conventions.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Wonderwheel
Friday, 12 November 2010
Timeline Search
Thursday, 11 November 2010
GOOGLE News
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
Create E-mail Alert
Of course, you'll need a free g-mail account to take advantage of all of this - but on balance it's well worth having.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
GOOGLE Scholar
Monday, 8 November 2010
Google Books Search Types
Sunday, 7 November 2010
Google Books
Saturday, 6 November 2010
GOOGLE Advanced Search
Take a look, and see what you can find.
Friday, 5 November 2010
Google Search Results
Mechanical Engineering
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]www.suite101.com/mechanical-engineering - Önbellek
Mechanical Engineering Magazine - MEMagazine
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]Mechanical Engineering - Articles from Mechanical Engineering ...
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]Mechanical Engineering articles | HighBeam Research - FREE trial
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]Index of mechanical engineering articles - Wikipedia, the free ...
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]Mechanical engineering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_engineering - Önbellek - Benzer
Mechanical Engineering Articles | Find Articles at BNET
- [ Bu sayfanın çevirisini yap ]Thursday, 4 November 2010
GOOGLE in English
The first piece of advice regarding GOOGLE is to use the English version of GOOGLE, very simply because it will provide you with a simple way of improving your English language comprehension skills.
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
APA Style
This site will provide you with help about any referencing and formatting questions you may have,
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
University of Richmond Writer's Web
Monday, 1 November 2010
What can be used as sources in academic work?
Books, articles and Internet sites are obvious of course, but you don't necessarily need to get stuck on these:
There are newspapers and magazines; films, television, video and radio; and lectures and speeches; and personal communications both orally and in writing, and more beyond. Depending on your subject area, there may be many more sources available than you think.
Sunday, 31 October 2010
APA
Saturday, 30 October 2010
Avoiding Plagiarism
Make sure you reference all your sources at all times. Direct quotations with reference are often used for this purpose. So are paraphrases. Paraphrasing means rewriting the author's original words into your own words. But remember! When paraphrasing, you still have to provide the reference and source!
Friday, 29 October 2010
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is one of the most serious academic offences. It is using other people's work or ideas without crediting their work by referencing it. These days it's also rather easy to detect through plagiarism detecting software, and even through search engines. A reader familiar with subject content will also spot plagiarism relatively easily, and so will a reader familiar with the style and level of the writer's English.
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Daily Postgraduate English Newspaper
However, to access the newspaper, you will need to open a free twitter account if you do not already have one. (Make sure you become a follower of EMUPLD at the same time!)
Concordancer
Let's say, I want to know how to use the word 'research'; I enter the word into the keyword box, and select the corpus I want to use (it's a drop down box) and submit. You get something like the following back, and studying it you start to see how 'research' is used and the types of words that are commonly used with 'research'.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Frequency Counter
How might this be useful? Well, say, you were about to read an article, and you wanted to find the most important words in the article that you might need to know before reading it. Put the article in the frequency counter, and you'll find out.
You can also obviously learn something about the frequency with which you use certain words in your own writing.
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
International Night
Advice (based on last year): Come hungry!
Vocabulary Profiler in Action
A nice feature of the profiler is that you can edit your text in another window, changing words to make your vocabulary more varied and sophisticated.
Vocabulary Profiler
Some people say that very good academic writing makes use of more lower frequency words. You can get an idea of your profile by entering a text into the profiler, and comparing your writing, say, with an article from your field.
Monday, 25 October 2010
List-Learn
GSL (General Service Lists) 1000 and 1001-2000 lists. These are the most frequent 2000 words in English.
UWL (University Word List) and AWL (Academic Word List). These lists provide lists of additional words that their designers identified as being particularly useful in academic work.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Lextutor
In the tests, you'll see references to K1 and K2. K1 refers to the most frequent 1000 words in English; K2 to the next most frequent 1000 words, and so on. What's the significance of this then? Take a look at the figures below. Basically, the first 1000 words in English are so common that they make up an average of 79.7% of any text you read. After that word families get less frequent and as a result harder to learn. But note that the 6000 mark has still not hit 90% - some way from the magic 95% number. Here's the link to the tests.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Test your vocabulary knowledge
Friday, 22 October 2010
How good is your vocabulary?
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Academic Phrase Bank
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Postgraduate English Workshops and Seminars
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
ISI Web of Knowledge
Find out more about the importance of citation in academic work by browsing the rest of this Wikipedia article.
Then learn more about citation indexes at Thomson Reuters.
Monday, 18 October 2010
Indian Film Festival
Plagiarism Checking
Out of interest, I pasted one of my published articles into the site in the original Word format. Sure enough, it found me out ! At the same time, because it conducts the search on the basis of relatively short phrases, it directed me to some sites and research I wasn't aware of, which was a useful bonus.
Of course, even GOOGLE can perform the same function, so it's sometimes worth self-checking work through such sites.
Sunday, 17 October 2010
Back up your work
i) keeping copies of your work on portable media.
ii) e-mailing work to yourself (free services like dropsend are available that will send large files by email).
iii) saving work on the Internet, e.g on GOOGLE docs or other similar web-based services that will store your work for you, and enable you to access it at anytime and any place.
These days, losing data and work will not be accepted as a good excuse or an unfortunate accident, but just viewed as carelessness.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Translation Tools
Take a look at this. It's part of the original English of our first newsletter.
http://twitter.com/emupld
Friday, 15 October 2010
Spellchecking and more with Google
A quick spellcheck can also be conducted by sticking a word in the GOOGLE search engine. The results will also show the word is used in sentences and phrases.
If you want to check phrases, use the Advanced Search option (just to the right of the normal GOOGLE search window).
GOOGLE has many other specialised search options. Included as a link on this page is the GOOGLE Scholar Search, which narrows a search to academic material.
For example, if you are studying tourism, a general search may well provide hits of no relevance (e.g. travel agencies, airlines etc.); A GOOGLE Scholar search excludes this material.
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Pasting from Word into the Internet
However, according to the programmes you are using, you may sometimes see some funny results from your pasting with odd bits of computer code appearing. These come from the Word source.
To avoid this:
1) Some Internet sites have a special 'clean Word' copy icon to use to paste. Check toolbars for this.
2) Other Internet sites will ask you whether you want to keep or remove 'formatting'; Remove it.
This works the other way round as well, i.e. when copy-pasting from the Internet to Word. When doing this:
1) Instead of using paste, use paste special (go to 'edit' on your toolbar); and select paste as unformatted text.
This gets rid of images, codes and all other unnecessary material and makes the pasting a lot quicker as well.
EMU Research Newsletter
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Grammar Check in Office
The grammar check is not always right!
Check out their advice here.
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
Paper Rater
Monday, 11 October 2010
Spellcheck Plus
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Careful with spellcheck!
Were are the students? I want to no if these are there books?
3 'spelling' mistakes but spellcheck won't notice any of them, because they are all real words.
Always use spellcheck!
Always check spelling again yourself!
Saturday, 9 October 2010
Gettting your spacing right!
Wrong Use: I have a big house,which is painted red.The neighbours hate it.
There are no spaces after the commas and full stops; The computer will count the part in red as one word, and indicate a spelling mistake.
Right Use: I have a big house, which is painted red. The neighbours hate it.
Readability statistics in Word
Now take a look at this explanation of the Reading Ease formula. As you'll see 17.7 means you need to be a college graduate to deal with the text. There is also a suggestion that the text may be confusing to some readers. Perhaps worth having another look, particularly to check on sentence length and punctuation?
Friday, 8 October 2010
Use spellcheck and grammar check in MS Office
Go to Tools and then Options, and check mark the options you want to make use of.
DO check the options for the Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid reading ease scales.
Then check out this Wikipedia Entry to find out what they are.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
New language discovered
Thursday, 30 September 2010
ENGL504 Group Closure
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
ENGL 501 and 504
The following elective courses are available for students who have reached the thesis stage of their post-graduate programme:
ENGL 501: Advanced Thesis Writing (This course is a second year elective course and assists participants with planning, developing and writing their thesis and helps them with producing work at an internationally publishable standard)
ENGL 504: Advanced Academic Speaking Skills (This course is a second year elective course to help participants prepare for thesis defences, conference presentations, and applications for jobs and further courses of study)
For further information, please contact:
Asst. Prof. Dr. Elmaziye Ozgur Kufi elmaziye.ozgur@emu.edu.tr
Asst. Prof. Dr. Nilgun Hancioglu nilgun.hancioglu@emu.edu.tr
Telephone: 630 3063
Orientation Session
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
ENGL505
The following elective course is available for Turkish-speaking post-graduate students:
ENGL 505: Intensive English for Turkish Post-graduate Students (KPDS and UDS Preparation)
This course is for students who are engaged in post-graduate study in Turkish but who wish to improve their English for future academic or professional purposes. It has a particular emphasis on preparing students for the KPDS and UDS exams. Turkish post-graduate students in English-medium programmes can also benefit from this course if they wish to take KPDS or UDS.
For further information, please contact:
Course Instructor: Berna Bereket e-mail: berna.bereket@emu.edu.tr Telephone: 630 2606
Or
Coordinator of Post-graduate English Courses: Asst. Prof. Dr. Elmaziye Özgür Küfi, e-mail: elmaziye.ozgur@emu.edu.tr Telephone: 630 3063
Monday, 27 September 2010
Orientation for New Postgraduate Students
The next orientation for new postgraduate English programmes will be held on Tuesday 28th September at 14.30 in the Blue Hall.
Friday, 24 September 2010
EMU Opening Ceremony
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
New Postgraduate English Courses this semester
ENGL504 is a second year elective course to help participants prepare for thesis defences, conference presentations, and applications for jobs and further courses of study.
ENGL505 is a course for Turkish speaking postgraduate students who wish to prepare for KPDS and UDS exams.
Monday, 20 September 2010
Postgraduate English Courses this semester
ENGL 503: Academic English for Postgraduate Students
The course covers all the major language skills from an academic perspective and is closely linked with students’ own individual academic studies.
ENGL 502: Advanced English for IELTS
In this course students develop their academic English skills further with a particular focus on the IELTS exam.
ENGL 501: Advanced Thesis Writing
This course assists students with planning, developing and writing their thesis and helps them with producing work at an internationally publishable standard.
ENGL 504: Advanced Academic Speaking Skills
This course aims at improving students’ academic speaking and presentation skills for the purpose of thesis defence, conference and seminar presentations.
ENGL 505: Intensive English for Turkish Postgraduate Students (KPDS and UDS Preparation)
This course is for students who are engaged in postgraduate study in Turkish but who wish to improve their English for future academic or professional purposes. It has a particular emphasis on preparing students for the KPDS and UDS exams.
More information about the Postgraduate English Support Programme will be provided in the orientation sessions to be held on 21st September (today) at 14.30 in Blue Hall and on 28th September at 14.30 again in Blue Hall.
For further information please contact Asst. Prof. Dr. Nilgun Hancioglu at nilgun.hancioglu@emu.edu.tr or Asst. Prof. Dr. Elmaziye Ozgur Kufi at elmaziye.ozgur@emu.edu.tr, Office phone no: 630 3063