Academic English

A student can hold a completely fluent, natural conversation in English and still struggle badly with the specific register academic work demands — that gap is exactly what Academic English addresses, and it's often invisible until a report or essay comes back with comments about being "too informal" or "unclear," despite the student's spoken English sounding fine.

Academic register uses different vocabulary (say "demonstrate" rather than "show," "significant" rather than "big"), different sentence structures, and different conventions around hedging claims, citing sources, and organizing an argument than everyday conversation ever requires. For a non-native speaker specifically, these are learned skills, not something that simply follows from general fluency, however strong.

Cohesion is often the single biggest gap: linking ideas across sentences and paragraphs with the right connective language (however, therefore, in contrast, as a result) so an argument reads as one continuous line of reasoning rather than a series of disconnected statements — a very common issue even among students whose grammar and vocabulary, sentence by sentence, are already solid.

Academic listening and note-taking — following a lecture and extracting what matters, rather than every word — is another skill this subject develops, since it's genuinely different from following casual spoken English. A tutor working on Academic English can focus specifically on the register and structure gap, distinct from general grammar correction or conversational practice, which is usually where the actual problem sits.