Academic Reading & Writing(Arts and Humanities)
During your academic studies, you have to read a lot and use the information gained from your reading in your assignments to display your knowledge and critical thinking skills, and to support your arguments. This course will be based on texts related to Arts, Humanities, Architecture, Law and Social Sciences.
The purpose of this course is to review basic reading strategies and skills; develop text awareness (e.g. inferring meaning of unknown words & dealing with complex sentences); help to develop your critical reading ability and improve your note-taking and summarising skills; and to raise your awareness of reading organisation. The course also develops your academic writing, focusing on a range of skills, at the sentence and paragraph level as well on longer pieces of writing (e.g. citing and referencing); this should enhance your writing and help you to avoid plagiarism.
Tutors expect you to discuss in pairs & small groups so you can think about issues related to your own academic reading and writing. You will be asked to prepare for class by reading texts (usually journal articles) before the lesson. Sometimes you will be asked to bring a text in your own subject area.
These courses follow a `50% fixed core + 50% negotiated syllabus´, based on an `options menu´/Learning Outcomes. Negotiation should take place in Week 5.
At the end of this course you should have improved in some of the following areas:
LEARNING OUTCOMES
Reading:
Skills and Strategies
At the end of this course students should be better able to apply basic strategies such as:
- Skimming, scanning
- Reading for detail
- Prediction
- Inferring
Textual Awareness
- Dealing with unknown/unfamiliar words
- Using word structure
- Modality/uncertainty
- Complex sentences
- Cohesion
- Text organisation
Critical Reading & Writing
At the end of this course students should be better able to:
- Make notes
- Avoid plagiarism
- Paraphrase key points
- Select and summarise relevant information
- Summarise and synthesize materials from different sources
- Identify and assess argument
Writing Learning Outcomes:
- Write in an impersonal style
- Understand the function of, and write effective, topic sentences, and develop a cohesive paragraph; use effective punctuation (: ; ,)
- Write effective introductory and concluding paragraphs
- Use cohesive devices to link paragraphs/ideas throughout a piece of writing
- Become familiar with a range of essay structures
- Use appropriate verb tense according to section type (e.g. reporting own research vs. reporting generally accepted research/literature)
- Write explanations
- Edit their own writing