University of Essex

There are a lot of International students about, so preferred spoken language was English. I was asked to attend a test at the beginning of the year, just for the assesment and afterwards given a choice of courses I could attens such as Academic Writing Skills, Vocabulary, Listening skills etc. If I wouldn't have been quite secure in my language ability, I'm sure I would've gone to some of those and would've found them helpful.

The experience is satisfactory. The community of international student is very large and, particularly, for postgraduate studies students are almost all international, while English people are more present in the undergraduate studies. As being a postgraduate student, I have less contacts with English students and this makes the communication also easier because you deal less with native speakers, slangs and dialects.

Before starting the courses in October, I attended an English course of one month in September at the University of Essex. This has been very useful especially for improving my spoken English with new terms but also they teached us how to organise a written project in English. Then it was fondamental to speak English everyday with my roomates and friends who were mainly foreign students and this was a great exercise for my capacity in understanding spoken English. Therefore, when I came back I had really improved my English and actually after three years I have been able to write my final project for my home university in English mainly thanks to this experience in Uk.

No problems communicating, with plenty of opportunities provided to meet with other international students. There are plenty of country-based society (e.g. French Society, Latin American Society, Bulgarian Society) so meeting other people from your host country is easy, but is is recommended to mix with a wide range of people to get the most of out your experience.

I was very pleased with the opportunities and support available at the university to improve my academic language skills. During my first year I enrolled myself in language classes which were free of charge and not assessed. People were very helpful and understanding.

I´ve been studying english for 6 years or more, so I already speak it quite good, but coming to england helped me out to get a better understanding and a cool posh accent, plus I write a lot better in english, because of the practice in writing essays.