This module will focus on the didactics of language for primary education. Students will learn how to plan and implement a variety of strategies, methods and techniques targeted to facilitate children’s language and literacy development and enrichment. It follows a constructivist and transdisciplinary approach where students are encouraged to actively engage in constructing meaningful language learning opportunities for children rather than the conventional teaching. Students will learn how to provide children with mastery of the language and literacy skills needed to enter secondary education.
Year 1
This module provides practice integrating those reading skills necessary for academic success at university. These skills include reading for detail, inferring vocabulary in context, finding main ideas, critical reading, understanding sequence, summarizing, recognizing organization, and outlining. In addition, it emphasizes academic vocabulary. Students are introduced to language skills for research and are expected to apply previously taught presentation skills to give more analytical presentations. In this course students are also introduced to basic components of the research paper: abstract, data analysis and interpretation.
This module teaches advanced grammar necessary for academic writing. It includes a review of basic grammar and a detailed study of noun, adjective, and adverb clauses, as well as prepositional, participial, gerund, and infinitive phrases. It will also provide written composition practice. Students will be introduced to the argumentative essay structure including the refutation of counter arguments. Students will engage in more complex discussion forums, debates and participate in organizing public presentations.
Students will learn and apply a variety of public presentation techniques useful for both individual presentations as well as participation in group discussions. An important aspect of the module is that it uses an active learning process whereby students learn a new skill and put it into practice. By the end of the module students will possess a number of public speaking strategies that will help them to prepare any range of public presentations, including proposals, as well as have the opportunity to participate in seminar organization and implementation.
Students will practice the process, purposes, and strategies of persuasive and explanatory writing. Students read and discuss works by both professional and student writers and explore techniques of argument and persuasion in writing a series of 5-6 essays. The module stresses revision, relies on frequent workshops of student writing, and aims finally to sharpen the student's ability to use evidence in a reasonable, convincing way.
Integrated learning activities involving all skill areas help students practice and apply the fundamentals of English in a more varied setting and develop more accuracy and control of their spoken and written English. Reading activities promote vocabulary expansion and model accurate structure. Students participate in discussion forums and are introduced to presentation skills for groups and individuals. Logical thinking in both oral and written formats is guided. As well, students are introduced to the five-paragraph essay format and practice writing summative, descriptive and comparative compositions.
Students will concentrate on gaining grammatical control of their communication (subject and verb agreement, modal auxiliaries, singular and plural nouns, pronouns, articles, sentence structure, statements, questions, simple and compound sentences, prepositions, gerunds and infinitives, adverbs and adjectives, punctuation, and some complex sentence patterns). At the end of the module, students should be able to write a paragraph without making major grammatical errors. Development of the five-paragraph essay format will continue and students will practice writing compositions that are opinion-based, persuasive and begin to compare literature from different sources. Development will continue in regard to presentation skills and discussion forums.
Integrated learning activities involving all skill areas help students practice and apply the fundamentals of English in a more varied setting and develop more accuracy and control of their spoken and written English. Reading activities promote vocabulary expansion and model accurate structure. Students participate in discussion forums and are introduced to presentation skills for groups and individuals. Logical thinking in both oral and written formats is guided. As well, students are introduced to the five-paragraph essay format and practice writing summative, descriptive and comparative compositions.
This module provides practice integrating those reading skills necessary for academic success at university. These skills include reading for detail, inferring vocabulary in context, finding main ideas, critical reading, understanding sequence, summarizing, recognizing organization, and outlining. In addition, it emphasizes academic vocabulary. Students are introduced to language skills for research and are expected to apply previously taught presentation skills to give more analytical presentations. In this course students are also introduced to basic components of the research paper: abstract, data analysis and interpretation.
Year 2
Students will practice the process, purposes, and strategies of persuasive and explanatory writing. Students read and discuss works by both professional and student writers and explore techniques of argument and persuasion in writing a series of 5-6 essays. The module stresses revision, relies on frequent workshops of student writing, and aims finally to sharpen the student's ability to use evidence in a reasonable, convincing way.
This is an advanced interdisciplinary writing course module emphasizing critical reading and thinking, argumentative writing, library research, and documentation of sources in an academic setting. Practice and study of selected rhetorics of inquiry (for example, historical, cultural, empirical, and ethnographic) employed in academic disciplines, preparing students for different systems of writing in their academic lives. Throughout this course, students will: significantly improve their academic writing; develop an understanding of how members of a particular discipline conceive of and engage in the rhetorical practices of that discipline; demonstrate understanding of the key conversations, the forms, and the conventions of writing in a particular discipline; gain experience in the construction of knowledge within a discipline and practice using its discourse; read critically and analyze rhetorically writings from a particular discipline and use those lenses to frame their own discourses; write in the different forms and styles of a particular discipline; and develop techniques for conducting research on the Internet and with other electronic databases.
