Abstract:

Nowadays one of the requirements for university teaching staff is an active participation in international scientific conferences and publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. High level language proficiency is necessary to achieve these professional goals. But, according to the study, only 15% of the University teaching staff has Advanced, Intermediate, Upper-Intermediate levels of English.

There are teaching staff advanced training courses in the South Ural State University where half of the groups are of Pre-Intermediate level.
The priority objectives of language training for them are reading of scientific literature in the original (75%) and writing research papers in English (80%).

Moreover, there is a lot of literature on academic writing for intermediate students and higher. But you can hardly find such course books for A2 students. So our intention was to create a modular course aimed at the basic academic writing skills formation. Different kinds of data collection were used to develop this course: questionnaires, interviews, peer observation and others.

The course is based on the principles of andragogy, modular education and blended learning i.e. teaching approach that includes both a face-to-face class and a digital learning component. All the modules developed can be divided into four groups according to the following levels:
- the level of words,
- the level of phrase,
- the level of sentence,
- the level of text.

These modules are included in the first group:
- Academic vocabulary;
- Borrowed and pseudo international words;
- Commonly misused words;
- Compound prepositions and conjunctions;
- Polysemantic and multifunctional words;
- Rules of proper names’ transliteration.

The second group consists of:
- Attribute groups, n+n phrases;
- Collocations;
- Structure and composition of scientific term;
- Paper headings;
- Positions and academic degrees equivalents.

The third group includes:
- Types of sentences, the structure of simple English sentence, word order;
- Key patterns for abstracts;
- Rules of punctuation.

The last group comprises:
- Genres of writing;
- Academic style of writing;
- Abstract and article structure;
- Means of cohesion.

All the modules have the same unified structure: theoretical material, bank of examples, exercises to do on-line and tutorials, tasks to do off-line and discussion. Different teaching approaches can be used throughout the course depending on the material and the group of students. Inductive and deductive approaches and also flipped learning are appropriate for mature students.

After completion of this course students enrich their academic vocabulary considerably and they are ready to write abstracts in English and proofread their articles.

Keywords:

Academic writing, pre-intermediate level, modular education, blended learning, approach.