Course Description
This integrated reading and writing course is for students who wish to upgrade their reading and writing skills for educational and/or employment purposes. The course is designed for students who have experience writing expository paragraphs and reasonable control of grammar and sentence structure. This course emphasizes reading longer passages at a reasonable rate, taking notes for study purposes, and writing for a variety of academic purposes. Students will work on improving composing and organizational skills for writing
5-paragraph academic essays, and revising, editing, and proofreading skills. Students will be introduced to simple research skills, such as finding appropriate sources and documenting source materials.
Course Content
Reading Skills
- To follow the ideas and information in readings
- Follow written instructions
- Use active reading strategies with long textbook chapters (e.g., surveying, skimming, and sectioning)
- Recognize purpose and/or issue, organization, overall key idea, main ideas, and key details in expository readings
- Identify writer’s overall point of view, tone, bias, supporting argument and evidence in opinion readings
- To determine meanings of unfamiliar words in course materials
- Use an English-English dictionary, thesaurus, index, glossary, Wikipedia
- Use word analysis (word families and affixes)
- Use context clues within sentences and in surrounding sentences (vocabulary in context)
- Use library resources to locate materials
- To use study skills
- Place text material into visual form
- Interpret visuals such as graphs and tables
- Prepare for objective tests (T/F, multiple choice) and essay tests using a variety of strategies
- Learn content from text/class materials concerning economic, political, cultural, and socially relevant topics
- Recognize cultural differences and show awareness of the general features of own culture and associated world views
Writing Skills
- To write informally
- Write reflectively about course readings
- Summarize ideas and information from readings
- To write formal summaries
- Take accurate notes from an assigned article
- Paraphrase accurately
- Write one-paragraph summaries of texts of one to two pages
- To write essays
- Prewriting
- Understand assignment instructions, including audience, purpose, and format
- Generate ideas from readings on economic, political, cultural, and socially relevant topics
- Select and narrow topics
- Create essay outlines, which include focused thesis statements, body paragraphs with main ideas, and support
- Writing
- Write well-structured introductions
- Develop unified, specific support in body paragraphs, reviewing paragraph structure as necessary
- Incorporate source material, showing understanding of plagiarism by paraphrasing, quoting, and citing appropriately
- Create coherence within and between paragraphs
- Write well-structured concluding paragraphs
- Revising
- Redraft and revise on own
- With peer and limited teacher feedback, re-draft and revise
- Edit and proofread
Accuracy
- To self-monitor for accuracy
- Use word processing editing aids (spelling, grammar check, thesaurus)
- Apply knowledge of parts of speech, sentence elements, specified sentence types, and mechanics
- Identify and correct errors
- For explicit instruction and evaluation
- Review all verb tenses, especially perfect tenses
- Identify and correct infinitive/gerund/base form errors
- Correctly use articles and other determiners
- Use a variety of complex structures and sentence patterns
- Use a range of academic vocabulary
- Items to work on as need arises
- All accuracy items from 100 and 200 levels
- Word choice and word form errors (e.g. parallelism in thesis statements)
Classroom Skills
- Take responsibility for:
- attendance and punctuality
- class work and assignments
- participation and teamwork
Learning Activities
The instructor will observe and evaluate students’ development and participation in reading and writing activities.
Whole and small group instruction will be combined with individual assistance and student-directed learning. Students will receive assistance with reading difficulties that arise from lack of familiarity with the structure, lexicon and cultural content of the reading passages; as well as participate in the setting of goals by identifying their communicative and language development needs, and selection of learning activities.
Means of Assessment
- Complete assigned skill-development tasks to a specified level of accuracy. These could include:
- Prepare assigned and self-selected readings; highlight and make margin notes on the readings.
- Prepare reference lists in APA format (This could be in the form of an annotated bibliography).
- Complete grammar exercises
- Paraphrase texts
- Write assignments that meet instructor specified criteria for content, organization, language use and accuracy, and format.
- informal notes that summarize ideas and information used as source material in students’ essays.
- at least one formal summary of an article used as source material in an essay.
- at least two word-processed multi-paragraph essays (cause/effect and comparison/contrast) with one incorporating source material documented APA style
- In class, plan, organize and write at least two short essays
- Complete quizzes, both skill based and content based
- Complete at least one self-assessment of learning strategies, progress, and classroom skills to be discussed with the instructor
Student achievement will be assessed using the letter grade system in accordance with College policy.
Learning Outcomes
Overall Objectives
Extend reading and writing competence and language accuracy for a range of educational and/or employment purposes
Specific Objectives
- Read and understand academic material from a variety of sources
- Take notes for academic purposes
- Use strategies to explore academic material
- Collect, analyze, and organize relevant information from a variety of sources
- Plan, write, revise and edit summaries and multi-paragraph essays, incorporating source material documented APA style
- Monitor and apply strategies to improve accuracy in grammar, sentence structure, and word choice to a specified level of accuracy
- Participate effectively in a college classroom
- Assess progress
Textbook Materials
Students may be required to purchase a textbook to be determined by the instructor.