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ENG102 ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES II

Course Objectives

COURSE DESCRIPTION

With a particular emphasis on academic research and speaking, English for Academic Purposes II recycles and builds on the skills of academic writing, critical analysis, and organization introduced in the pre-requisite course English for Academic Purposes I. Using learner-centered practices, the course introduces the key concepts of reliable academic research and information literacy, exposes students to authentic and/or academic materials in written, oral and visual formats, and thereby has the ultimate aim of helping learners become more autonomous and resourceful in their academic studies. Typical classwork of ENG 102 involves close reading of the source texts and videos, followed by class discussions, which require higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, evaluation of, and reaction to the materials. The productive skills required in the course involve writing essays using the given source materials and speaking in seminars and presentations by formulating intellectually mature and thorough ideas and arguments with the help of library resources and online databases. The use of outside sources also includes critical evaluation skills to find reliable sources. Compared to the ENG 101 course, in ENG 102, students will have more opportunities for speaking in the form of seminars and discussions that require higher-order thinking skills, which will not only prepare them for the sequel course, ENG 211 Academic Speaking Skills, but also for their later studies.

The overall aim of this course is to develop students in all four skills, namely reading, listening, writing, and speaking, for academic purposes and to enhance learner autonomy so that students can transfer these skills to their departmental undergraduate and postgraduate courses and professional lives.

Course Content

The course reinforces academic writing skills. In this course students write different types of essays based on the ideas they are exposed to in the reading selections. The emphasis is on the writing process in which students go through many stages from brainstorming and outlining to producing a complete documented piece of writing.

Course Learning Outcomes

WRITING

Students will:

• distinguish between facts and opinions
• develop well-reasoned and relevant ideas that are supported with reliable evidence and free from logical fallacies
• analyze writing prompts and produce relevant responses that address a given prompt fully
• write coherent, logical, organized, and well-developed academic essays
• identify relevant information from different texts and synthesizing them by paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting directly
• incorporate citations accurately and effectively in writing and give correct references in APA style

SPEAKING

Students will practice communicating effectively in academic contexts by:

• participating in whole class/group discussions to express and justify their opinions
• conducting research and finding relevant sources to use in their oral performances and evaluating sources critically and effectively  
• reacting to different ideas to agree/disagree/refute/justify
• analyzing and synthesizing information from different sources to justify their opinions
• reflecting on their learning, experience, and course materials during interviews

READING

Students will practice reading a text:

• 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)
• critically by identifying inferred meanings, arguments, and attitudes, distinguishing between facts and opinions, and evaluating information to make critical judgments
• strategically when doing research to identify relevant sources and eliminate the irrelevant ones: predict content by looking at the title and subtitles, reading the abstract, introduction & conclusion, skimming and scanning the text
• to use it as support in writing by evaluating and synthesizing information from multiple texts

LISTENING

Students will practice while listening and note-taking:

• for specific purposes
• to identify main ideas, supporting ideas/details, as well as implied ideas
• to recognize the relationship between a recording/video and a reading text
• to reflect on and react to ideas in a recording/video
• to evaluate ideas in a recording/video to use them as support in their own writing