The following skills are the learning outcomes of the course:
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