English as a Second Language 290D - Academic Writing for Grad Stds

Appropriate for graduate students and upper division undergraduate students. Focuses on skills needed for writing academic papers and research projects. Provides oral presentation practice related to writing assignments. Develops awareness of authentic text types representing various academic disciplines, revealed by corpus linguistics research. Examines considerations of context, audience, purpose, reader writer relationships, and culture. Promotes precision of academic vocabulary selection, increases the accuracy and sophistication of grammatical structures related to writing, and instructs how to use rhetorical devices to improve text cohesion and coherence. Includes small group work, revising of writing, and individual conferences.

ESL 290D is for non-native speakers of English who are international graduate students and domestic students to build their confidence as writers of research English. In this course, students will work on creating written products that are discipline specific. They will analyze research papers within their fields, practice writing abstracts, proposals, research reports, posters for presentations, as well as other products. The course will consist of tasks associated with the academic writing process, and throughout, there will be an emphasis on the conventions of academic written English, including grammatical concepts, vocabulary and highly frequent collocations. Students will also have the opportunity to present their work twice.