(401) DEVELOPING A PRE-SESSIONAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE COURSE FOR INTERNATIONAL DISTANCE LEARNING STUDENTS: A CASE OF E-VOLUTION

摘要

This paper discusses the development and piloting of an online pre-sessional English course forinternational students who were about to begin online distance learning Masters programmes. Itdescribes and explains an important shift of focus during the design process, in which what wasinitially intended to be a 'distance learning version' of an existing English for Academic Purposes(EAP) course became an online course in its own right, exploiting different interaction spaces thatcreated realistic opportunities for the students to use different styles of academic written English. Thepaper reports participants' evaluations and comments, gathered during and at the end of the course.Finally, it sets out the changes planned for the next iterations of the course.