ELAP N140 (Syllabus)

Course Introduction

The purpose of this class is to improve your grammar and vocabulary in English for academic contexts. If you do well in this class, you will be better prepared to do well in courses where English is the medium of instruction.

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Target Goals

By the end of this course, you should be able to recognize the following:

• identify these parts of speech in sentences: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, descriptive adverbs (including comparative and superlative forms), prepositions, and modal auxiliaries
• identify subjects, verb phrases, objects, object of prepositions, and prepositional phrases
• state the number of clauses in a sentence
• identify and correct incomplete sentences and comma splices
• recognize and name the four basic verb tenses: simple present, simple past, present continuous, and past continuous
• recognize and name four perfect tenses: present perfect, present perfect continuous, past perfect, and past perfect continuous
• recognize common errors in meanings of modals
• recognize noncount and count nouns
• recognize the meanings of level 1 words or phrases from the University List, a compilation of the most common sub-technical vocabulary in academic textbooks

You should also be able to control these structures:

• identify and correct incomplete sentences and comma splices
• recognize and correct incorrect expressions of future time
• recognize and correct impossible verb forms
• recognize and correct incorrect modal constructions
• control
  • existential there and false subject it
  • fragments, run-ons, and comma splices
  • simple present, present continuous, simple past, and past continuous in a paragraph
  • subject-verb agreement
  • irregular verbs
  • present perfect and present perfect continuous with for and since
  • causatives
  • gerunds and infinitives as subjects and as objects of verbs and prepositions
  • the list of common noncount nouns
  • the "singular count noun cannot go bare" rule
  • plural -s

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Instructor

Your instructor is an experienced English Language professional at the University of Washington, and will be available to answer your questions and check your work via email.

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Required Materials and Additional Resources

The entire course is delivered via the Internet. You do not need to buy additional materials. Each lesson has a link to the Newbury House Online dictionary. However, you may also find it useful to have a good English learner's dictionary.

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Design of the Distance Learning Course

This online course is designed to improve your skills in sentence level grammar and vocabulary. It should take you about 80 hours to complete the course. You have ten weeks (nine weeks in summer quarter) to finish nine lessons. Each lesson contains explanations of the grammar and vocabulary. It also contains tasks to help you identify and practice producing structures that are grammatically and semantically correct.

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Evaluation

Beginning Academic English is not a credit course, but you will receive 5 Continuing Education Units if you pass the course. Passing is based on successfully completing at least 80% of the assignments.

Academic Honesty

Students enrolled in University of Washington Distance Learning courses are expected to observe the same code of academic honesty required of other University of Washington students. Violation of this code can result in academic penalties, such as receiving a failing grade in the course and other disciplinary actions. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating on examinations and plagiarism, the latter meaning offering the language or ideas of someone else as one's own. Plagiarism may range from failure to credit isolated formulas, sentences, paragraphs, or ideas to entire articles copied from books, periodicals, speeches, or the writings of other students.

Situations involving academic misconduct for noncredit courses will be reviewed by a UW Educational Outreach Committee on Academic Conduct. This committee is composed of advisory board members for the certificate program in which the student is enrolled. If evidence of academic misconduct is established, students will be given a failing grade for the course and any refund of tuition fees will be denied.

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Advice

A major drawback of distance learning courses is the lack of a regular class session. It is easy to get behind without a class meeting each day. For this reason, it's a good idea to set aside a time each day to log on and work on the course. From the beginning, establish a dialogue with your instructor via email. Ask questions about sentences that you don't understand. Think of this dialogue as your opportunity to have more personalized help with your English than a regular class would provide.

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Course Schedule

Here is the schedule of assignments for the quarter. Print this document so you can keep a record of your progress through the tasks.

The exercises in bold are those that you must type in a response box while you are in UW Online and send to your instructor. If they arrive on time, in ascending numerical order, and you have successfully completed them, or later revise them on time, you will receive full credit.

NOTE: It is a good idea to keep a copy of your work in case there are technical problems. To keep a copy, you can (1) print a copy when you type your response in UW Online, or (2) save your work in Word and then copy and paste into the UW Online response box.

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