Syllabus
Course aims
This course gives students knowledge, skills, and practice in the use of English to present ideas to an audience via reports and presentations. Students learn information mapping techniques to represent essential ideas from a text or discussion, and to show the relationship between those ideas. Students cooperate to solve problems through English and present their ideas in reports and presentations.
Learning objectives
By the end of this course, students will have improved their ability to understand and produce English texts describing objects and people, describing sequences, explaining cause-and-effect, making inferences, making comparisons, describing graphs and data, and discussing the pros and cons of a proposed idea. They will also be able to represent such texts as information maps, and convert those maps to English text.
Course description
During this course, students study 7 discourse styles that are useful for presenting ideas in English. Two lessons are spent on each style. In the first of these lessons, students are introduced to the discourse style and study both written and oral examples of the style in use. For homework, students do activities to familiarize themselves with vocabulary, phrases and grammar constructs that are commonly used in the target discourse style, and then they prepare their own report or presentation, based on the samples that were studied in the first class. In the second class, students present their ideas, either as a report or presentation, and receive feedback from their classmates and their teacher. In the penultimate class, there will be a test on the content of the sample materials studied during the course. In the final class, students will have an opportunity to reflect on their experience doing the course, and to review their grades for homework and assignments.
Textbooks and Materials
- Teacher created handouts will be distributed in class
- Online materials will be available from the course website
Reference books and materials
- There are no required reference materials
Student Assessment
- Students who attend at least 13 out of 16 lessons and achieve a grade of 60% or more will be awarded a passing grade.
| Grades will be apportioned as follows: | ||
| 70% | Homework and In-class activities | |
|---|---|---|
| 10% | 1. Description | |
| 10% | 2. Sequence | |
| 10% | 3. Cause and Effect | |
| 10% | 4. Inference | |
| 10% | 5. Comparison | |
| 10% | 6. Graphs and Data | |
| 10% | 7. Pros and Cons | |
| 30% | Final Test | |
| ==================== | ||
| 100% | Total | |
| ==================== | ||
| Letter grades will be apportioned as follows: | |
| AA | overall assessment is 90% or more |
|---|---|
| A | overall assessment is 80-89% |
| B | overall assessment is 70-79% |
| C | overall assessment is 60-69% |
NOTE: Activities and schedule may vary for each instructor.