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