In-sessional academic English support

As we come to the end of 2023-24 academic year, some changes are taking place in In-sessional provision. From August 2024 In-sessionals will be based at LTE, the Learning Teaching Enhancement centre at SOAS. 

There will be four main ways of providing In-sessional support: through 4 or 5 week courses with small class sizes either on campus or online, workshops delivering essential skills , 1-1 tutorials given over 2 or 3 x 30 minute sessions and a suite of online materials to access for independent study.  

In-sessional courses are designed to help International Students with their academic systems and skills in English, specifically with writing, reading, speaking and listening, grammar and vocabulary acquisition. In addition they exist, alongside other areas of LTE provision, to help introduce international students to the way a Higher Educational Institution in the UK works, and makes assessments. 

In-sessional courses, as the name suggests, take place 'in-session', during term time (pre-sessional courses take place before -pre-session-the academic year begins). They begin in the first term after you are fully enrolled as a student at SOAS.

They are free of charge and non-credit bearing and no formal assessments are made. They exist to support international students on their academic journey and are open to all students for whom English is not their first language.

Who should apply

These programmes are open to all international students at SOAS for whom English is not their first language: Foundation Year, Undergraduate, taught Postgraduate, Postgraduate Research, Visiting Research-all except students from IFCELS and Distance Learning.

Initially, at the start of term,  the EAP Lead at LTE will contact students who might be interested in taking these courses (towards the end of September) by e-mail and invite them to apply prioritising those who, from their English language assessments or referrals from academics, might be seen to be most in need of support.

The classroom based courses run five times a year so if you are not accepted initially you can apply again later (see below for dates).

From week 6 of the first term, 1-1 tutorials will be offered and students can apply for these from the LTE Sharepoint pages. These will be offered in 1, 2 or 3 part sessions of 30 minutes each, depending on what is needed by the student.

The workshops will also be advertised on LTE Sharepoint pages and students are invited to register for these. The workshop approach will cater for larger numbers of students but will be pitched especially at those who are from non UK backgrounds for whom English is not a first language. and they will cover the four skill areas of writing, reading, speaking and listening as well as the system areas of grammar and vocabulary acquisition. Some of these will be online and some may be from larger capacity rooms in SOAS. These will exist alongside the regular LTE workshops.

Online self-study provision is self-access and available from the LTE Sharepoint pages. It can be accessed any time of year.

Office hours

Neil Robbie is available in D3 in the library (near bookstack 185) and you can drop in to see him on Mondays, Tuesdays or Thursdays most afternoons in term time.

Please e-mail Neil at nr2@soas.ac.uk prior to visiting to be sure of an appointment. He is also contactable by telephone extension 4815 or online through MS Teams.

Application

Applications open at five different points during the academic year. For unavoidable reasons Block 5 In-sessional courses have not been available so far this year but may be advertised soon.

Further reading

• In-sessional BLE resources