English for Diplomats

The course is designed for students of diplomacy and international relations to develop their communicative competence of English at C1/C2 level. It aims at improving students’ productive, receptive, interaction and mediation skills by reading, analysing and discussing texts as well as video and audio records pertinent to diplomacy and international relations. Students build on diplomatic concepts and specialised vocabulary by delivering presentations and writing analytic papers as well as practising the relevant linguistic strategies and rhetorical devises by simultaneously developing skills of individual and cooperative work, competences of intercultural communication and personal values. The forms of study include lectures and seminars in addition to work in the virtual Moodle environment as well as group and self-study tasks.

To equip students with the communicative competence of English for diplomacy and international relations, which entails linguistic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic components, focusing on receptive (listening and reading comprehension), productive (speaking and writing) and mediation skills at the advanced (C1/C2) level.

Good B2 competence of English (according to the Common European Framework)

Topics of linguistic input: 1. Specific structures of passive, relative and adverbial clauses 2. Collocations of academic discourse 3. Conditionality and present subjunctive in formal discourse 4. Metaphor and metonymy 5. Structural and lexical emphasis: focus on clefting and inversion 6. Equivocation, ambiguity and euphemisms Topics of communicative input: 7. Key concepts in diplomacy 8. Nationalism, identity and diplomatic language 9. Issues in public diplomacy 10. International law and international organisations 11. Historical outline of the European Union 12. European institutions 13. Monetary issues in the European Union

The student successfully communicates at C1/C2 level of English in the field of diplomacy and international relations. The student can recognise and use correctly specialised vocabulary, collocations as well as grammatical and rhetorical devises typical of international relations and diplomacy. The student properly analyses academic and media texts and displays adequate comprehension of audio input pertinent to the field of diplomacy and international relations. Having collected and critically evaluated the sources, the student prepares and effectively delivers oral group presentations and an individual simulated conference presentation on topics related to diplomacy and international relations. The student initiates, develops and chairs a discussion on topical issues of international relations in formal and informal settings by presenting his/her well-grounded opinion, responding to the arguments deployed by other discussants and mediating communication. The student can write an academic abstract and an analytic essay within the field of diplomacy and international relations with an adequate level of proficiency.