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ENG101 ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES I

Course Objectives

The overall aim of this course is to develop students’ academic writing skills through reading, listening, and speaking, which serve as input for writing

WRITING Students will: 1. analyze sample academic texts to distinguish features of academic writing such as style, formal grammar and vocabulary, concision, discourse markers and avoiding logical fallacies 2. analyze writing prompts and produce relevant responses that address a given prompt fully 3. write coherent, logical, organized, and well-developed paragraphs by following stages of process writing 4. incorporate citations accurately and effectively in writing by identifying relevant information from different texts and synthesizing them and by paraphrasing, summarizing and quoting directly from outside sources

READING

Students will practise reading a text: 1. to comprehend it fully (identifying main/supporting ideas, identifying tone, purpose, and audience, recognizing patterns of organization and cohesive devices, text annotation, guessing meaning from context) 2. critically by identifying inferred meanings, arguments, and attitude, distinguishing between facts and opinions, and evaluating information to make critical judgments 3. to use it as support in writing by evaluating and synthesizing information from multiple texts 

 SPEAKING

Students will practise communicating effectively in academic contexts by: 1. participating in discussions 2. expressing and justifying their opinions in whole class/group discussions/debates 3. reacting to different ideas to agree / disagree / refute / justify 4. analyzing and synthesizing information from different sources to justify their opinions 5. giving short individual or group presentations 

LISTENING

Students will practise: 1. listening for a specific purpose 2. listening for main ideas and supporting ideas/details 3. listening for implied ideas 4. listening and note-taking 5. recognizing the relationship between a recording/video and a reading text 6. reflecting on and reacting to ideas in a recording/video 7. evaluating ideas in a recording/video to use them as support in their own writing

Course Content

The course reinforces academic reading skills (finding the main idea, skimming, scanning, inferring information, guessing vocabulary from context, etc.) through reading selections on a variety of topics. It also aims at developing critical thinking, which enables students to respond to the ideas in a well organized written format. Other reading related writing skills such as paraphrasing and summarizing are also dealt with.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course students will be able to

-    use relevant reading strategies (i.e. skimming, scanning, previewing) according to different text and task types

-    infer the underlying meaning of a given sentence or parts of an academic text

-    identify key ideas, points of reference, types of figurative speech and writer’s technique in an academic text

-    distinguish between facts and opinions in an academic text

-    guess the meaning of unknown words in an academic text

-    use different types of dictionaries (i.e. bilingual, monolingual, collocation and thesaurus)

-    recognize the relationship between ideas in a text and between multiple texts

-    break down complex structures into meaningful chunks

-   understand syntactical relations among the parts of long complex structures

-    initiate and maintain discussions

-    express opinions clearly

-    respond to questions

-    listen for specific information

-    use correct, appropriate language structures, vocabulary and discourse markers in written and oral production

-    write unified and coherent academic paragraphs (expository and reaction) and essay (expository)

-    carry out the stages in a process writing approach during writing paragraphs and/or essays