English Language and Communication Program

Helping the students of KAUST develop the necessary skills to communicate their ground-breaking science to a global audience

Our

Mission

Through our courses, workshops, and one-on-one support, we:

  • support academic success with a strong foundational English language program and a range of skill-building courses
  • empower students to present themselves and their research with confidence
  • expand professional opportunity through the development of strong scientific writing, oral communication, and presentation skills

As a unit, we are dedicated to serving the student population, the majority of whom are non-native speakers of English. Students often need our support and additional English language instruction at the start of their academic programs and while writing their theses and dissertations.

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Request a tailor-made short course or workshop

from the ELCP

Although the ELCP offers a range of courses and workshops, there may be something specific related to English you want your team at KAUST to concentrate on. Maybe you want your students to work on an elevator pitch or write a research proposal, for example? Whatever your needs, you can now send them directly to us using the form now available on our website. Just click on the Course & Workshop Requests tab in the navigation at the top of the page, or follow this link.

ELCP

news

Academic Word of the Week

28 April, 2022

Hello and welcome to the last Academic Word of the Week before the Eid break!

Today we’ll be looking at an adjective:

UNIQUE

Make sure you get the pronunciation right: /juːˈniːk/

Pronunciation is important when deciding which indefinite article (a, an) to use with UNIQUE. Although the first letter of our word is a vowel, it is actually pronounced with an initial /j/ consonant sound; therefore, UNIQUE is always preceded by the indefinite article ‘a’.

Meaning: Being the only one of its kind.

Example sentence: Each person’s fingerprints are unique.

The word UNIQUE is an example of a non-gradable adjective: i.e., it describes an extreme or absolute quality of something. This means that we cannot use the adverb ‘very’ with a word like UNIQUE. If you want to qualify a non-gradable adjective with an adverb, use ‘absolutely’ or ‘really’.

UNIQUE can also be followed by the preposition ‘to’ followed by a person or thing.

Example sentence: The issue under discussion is unique to Canada.

Academic Word of the Week is taking a break for a couple of weeks, but we’ll be back on 19 May.

Eid Mubarak!

The ELCP Team 

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