About this School

The Use of English Unit is one of the pioneer units established in the School of General Studies in 1960 by the founding fathers of the University for the development of English language proficiency in the students.

The University and the Use of English unit at its inception placed a very high premium on the production of graduates with a good command and mastery of the English language in both oral and written communication.

Accordingly, highly qualified academic staff members were recruited to teach the two courses offered by the Unit; the senior scholars of the Unit manage the Unit in turns, and successive leaders of the University have sustained this tradition. Today, the Unit has more than twenty-four seasoned lecturers who teach the courses in the two campuses of the University. The profiles of the lecturers can be found in the website of the school.

The aim of The Use of English courses is to teach students study skills which they require for their academic work in the University. These skills include listening, reading, note-taking techniques, using the library and writing a term paper, etc. The course also emphasizes oral communication and speech work. The first course (GSP 101) comprises Study skills, The Use of Library and Basic Research Methods.

The second course, GSP 102 aims at helping students:

• develop competence in the use of English through knowledge of the basic principles of grammar. At the end of the component, students should be able to apply grammatical prescriptions correctly in speech and writing;
• understand the nature of the writing process as different from speech;
• understand the basic unit of every writing process – the sentence and its parts;
• be able to write a paragraph and essay of different kinds;
• acquire knowledge of writing other forms of modern communication – the form and style of technical writing;
• learn the principles/ techniques of book reviews; and
• acquire the basic principles of modern information techniques.