Sources for Group Writing Task : University Fees

As a group, you will answer the following question:


Is the University of Essex right to set its tuition fees at £9000 per year?

The BBC has a very useful Q&A page on the subject, which should provide sufficient background information to help you to understand the context.  You should then divide the following texts between members of your group.  Each group member should take notes on their designated article and be prepared to feed information back to the group.  You will use the information you gather to write a group essay.

TEXTA :“From the Vice-Chancellor” and “Focus on Quality as fees set at £9,000”. Essex Quarterly. April 2011 ; “Vice Chancellor’s Update” Available online at https://www.essex.ac.uk/budget_prospects/vc_updates/240211.aspx [Retrieved 25 July 2012]

TEXT B: Vasagar, J. (2011) “Fees will put teenagers off applying for university, say 42% of vice chancellors” The Observer, 12 June. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/12/fees-chancellors-poll-universities?INTCMP=SRCH [Retrieved 25 July 2012]

TEXT C : Paton, G. and Collins, N. (2011) “Ten universities could fail after £9,000 tuition fees” The Telegraph, 7 June  Available online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8560874/Ten-universities-could-fail-after-9000-tuition-fees.html [Retrieved 25 July 2012]

EXTRA TEXT text:  BIS (2011) “Putting students at the heart of higher education”. Available online at   http://bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2011/Jun/he-white-paper-students-at-the-heart-of-the-system [Retrieved 25 July 2012].  A full pdf of this document is also available here: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/higher-education/docs/h/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf 

Suggested Self-study Material to follow EAP 3.8

“Organising paragraphs”, Chapter 1.10 from Bailey

“Introductions and conclusions”, Chapter 1.11 from Bailey

“Paragraph Structure” from Oshima & Hogue’s Writing Academic English, pp2-17

“From Paragraph to Essay” from Oshima & Hogue’s Writing Academic English, pp. 56-80 

Beowulf

In this week's Film Club (4.30pm, Thursday 26th July, Room 6.300, Tickets 50p!) we will be screening the 2007 production of Beowulf.  But what is Beowulf, and how is it connected to the British Museum?

Students of literature are often introduced to Beowulf as the oldest surviving work of English literature.  It's a poem about the heroic deeds of Beowulf, a warrior prince or chieftan, who must protect his people by fighting first the monster Grendel, then Grendel's angry mother, and finally a dragon.  The exact age of the poem is unknown, because it would have passed from generation to generation orally.  It tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon world, but the earliest written versions we have of the poem are thought to date back to the 11th Century.  As you can see from the image above, it may be hard to recognise the language as English.  The spoken and written forms of English have changed dramatically over the past 1000 words, and we now refer to the language of Beowulf as Old English.

For more information about the poem, including early manuscripts, and video and audio recordings of experts speaking about it, the British Library website has an excellent page devoted to Beowulf. The Nobel-prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has written a modern English version of the poem that is much easier to read, and perhaps better still are the video recordings of Heaney reading his poem aloud.  The following clip, in which Heaney reads the poem's prologue, is an obvious starting point!

Our link from Beowulf to the British Museum comes via the Sutton Hoo Helmet, which was discovered, unsurprisingly, at Sutton Hoo - not far from here in Colchester.The BBC Radio 4 programme on the Sutton Hoo Helmet suggests that the real-life Beowulf would probably have been buried wearing a helmet just like the one unearthed at Sutton Hoo. For anyone with an interest in archaeology, there's a nice slideshow on the archaeology behind Beowulf here.

Beowulf is an action hero, and the 2007 film adaptation is certainly an action movie.  It starts Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie, but it's an all-CGI production.  Director Robert Zemeckis is a pioneer of CGI (see this history of CGI in the movies for more details) and the film should appeal to anyone interested in film-making and animation.  For more on the film, you can read reviews from Empire magazine and the Film School Rejects blog.  Finally, I'll leave the trailer to introduce the style and content of the film to you...as you can see, the story has come a long way since its origins in Old English oral poetry.

PS Classic Recommended Reading : Week 1

During the Presessional Programme, you will be asked to read and study texts on a range of themes and topics. If you want to prepare for lessons by checking that you can understand these texts, you can look at classroom material in advance via this blog.

Also, if you find any of the topics particularly interesting, you can use this blog to follow links to further reading around the subject.

In week one, we'll be looking at the themes of Culture Shock, Independent Study, Exercise, and The University of Essex. Click on the themes themselves for texts to read and explore.