121250 UE English in a Professional Context - Advanced (2011W)

EPCO Advanced builds on the skills acquired in EPCO and aims to further enable students to cope with texts that belong to highly specialised professional genres. As such, the course is strongly process-oriented, focusing on the development of transferable generic skills applicable to a range of different genres, and not exclusively product-oriented, i.e. focusing on the end-product(s) of a limited number of specific genres. This is seen as an essential skill in a world of constantly changing and newly-emerging discourse practices and their textual products; EPCO Advanced aims to give students chance to put the skills they have worked on so far throughout the language competence programme into practice.

Although the main focus in EPCO Advanced is on the acquisition of transferrable skills, these skills will be practised in connection with content information of one specific professional domain, e.g. business, technology, law. These topics (or professional domains) mainly serve as carrier content through which to develop the three main skill areas worked on in EPCO:
• Function (Discourse): identifying key text types and their functions and placing them in their context of use, establishing links between text types
• Language (Text): identifying characteristic features of such texts and genre conventions (moves and lexico-grammar)
• Content (Topic): familiarising learners with the procedures and conventions of the specific professional domain, its key concepts and terms.

EPCO Advanced builds on the skills acquired in EPCO and aims to further enable students to cope with texts that belong to highly specialised professional genres. As such, the course is strongly process-oriented, focusing on the development of transferable generic skills applicable to a range of different genres, and not exclusively product-oriented, i.e. focusing on the end-product(s) of a limited number of specific genres. This is seen as an essential skill in a world of constantly changing and newly-emerging discourse practices and their textual products; EPCO Advanced aims to give students chance to put the skills they have worked on so far throughout the language competence programme into practice.

Although the main focus in EPCO Advanced is on the acquisition of transferrable skills, these skills will be practised in connection with content information of one specific professional domain, e.g. business, technology, law. These topics (or professional domains) mainly serve as carrier content through which to develop the three main skill areas worked on in EPCO:
• Function (Discourse): identifying key text types and their functions and placing them in their context of use, establishing links between text types
• Language (Text): identifying characteristic features of such texts and genre conventions (moves and lexico-grammar)
• Content (Topic): familiarising learners with the procedures and conventions of the specific professional domain, its key concepts and terms.

This course aims to equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary for coping with highly specialised texts from different professional domains. The focus is on independent genre analysis and adapting texts to make them suit different target audiences and purposes