ESL 47:
Intermediate Integrated
Reading & Writing
Spring 2024: Jan 13th-May 16th
Class & Instructor's Information
Professor: Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez
Class Meetings:
Face-to-Face only on Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:30 am-11:50 am in B.S. (Business Social Sciences) Room 128
Other class assignments and learning tasks will be accessed Asynchronous Online in Canvas, this means no online-live meetings, you will work independently.
My Zoom Office Hours: Thursday's 9:00 am -11:00 am, you can access my zoom details in Canvas. I will show you how to do this in class on the first day.
Email: ramiref@crc.losrios.edu please allow 24–48-hour response time. Thank you for your patience!
Welcome to ESL 47: Integrated Reading and Writing!
Welcome to ESL 47 Integrated Reading and Writing Class!
My name is Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez, you are more than welcome to call me Professor Fairuze or Ms. Fairuze.
I am a first-generation Yemeni American college graduate. I received my B.A. in Anthropology and my M.A. in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) alongside a certificate to teach college writing and composition from Sacramento State. I have taught advanced academic reading and writing at Sac State, UC Davis, and Cosumnes River College. During my undergraduate and graduate academic journey, I worked with Iraqi and Syrian Refugees, and international students from multiple countries. Each interaction has taught me we need language and literacy to help us navigate and participate in our society, whether that be for school, work, or for personal reasons, we need to know how to effectively use language to express our needs, and to demonstrate our competence in an academic subject, too.
Therefore, in this class, I will provide learning opportunities that will allow you to read and write for different, personal and academic purposes. You will learn to use and apply reading strategies that will help you to extract important details from the texts you will read. In addition, you will identify vocabulary words you know and do not know and learn to use new vocabulary words in your writing.
Finally, you will distinguish summary, analysis, and synthesis writing, and write using different sentence structures to write effective academic paragraphs to develop a strong cohesive essay.
I look forward to learning more about you through your writing and through our interactions in class and witnessing your literacy growth.
Sincerely,
Professor Fairuze
ESL 47 Course Description
Cosumnes River College Course Description
ESL 47 is an integrated reading and writing course for English language learners at the intermediate level.
In preparation for academic writing, students build skills in pre-writing, learn to write strong paragraphs, and practice the basics of essay structure.
Students also build academic reading skills and vocabulary. With the information gathered through readings, students begin to use academic content to supplement their ideas in writing.
This course is part of the reading and writing sequence, which prepares ESL students to take college courses leading to a certificate, degree, and/or transfer.
ESL 47 Learning Goals and Outcomes
All literacy assignments in my class, both formal and informal will allow you to progress towards achieving the learning goals and outcomes below. This means by the time you complete this class you will be able to academically perform the following literacy skills:
Demonstrate comprehension of multi-paragraph academic texts.
Actively and critically respond to readings through discussions, journals, etc.
Begin to demonstrate understanding of main and supporting ideas through the use of graphic organizers or basic outlines.
Employ level appropriate vocabulary building strategies.
Begin using prefixes and suffixes to expand vocabulary.
Recognize and identify word families.
Use strategies to independently study new vocabulary in and out of class.
Use common English sentence structure patterns.
Use simple, compound, and complex sentences with correct punctuation and conjunctions.
Employ the writing process to complete several writing assignments
Show the ability to complete all steps of the writing process for paragraph and basic essay writing.
Write fully developed paragraphs with a clear topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence.
Show the ability to move from paragraph to basic essay writing.
Demonstrate an understanding of unity and coherence in writing.
Apply level-appropriate grammar to writing to make ideas clear, concise, and specific.
Use correct formatting, spelling, punctuation, capital letters, and grammar in in-class and out-of-class writing assignments.
Demonstrate an emerging ability to make meaning of new information in writing.
synthesize information learning from readings.
What learning activities will I engage in?
How will I be Formally Assessed (Graded)?
How will I be Formally Assessed (Graded)?
All assignments will have a prompt and a rubric, clear information that states how the student can receive a 'complete' to earn full credit. If I mark the student's work as 'incomplete', in order to a 'complete', the student must revise (redo) the assignment. To me, this is how learners, learn. It is important that students become aware of their strengths and limitations in reading and writing, to improve their literacy skills. This is my teaching philosophy.
Vocabulary Log and Reading Annotations (In-Class)
15% -of your grade
You will need to have a notebook where you keep track of new vocabulary words from our readings. In this notebook you will write annotations about the texts you will read. For example, an annotation is stopping to write down a question about the text you read, or writing down important information like main ideas of the text, or supporting details about the text. Sometimes, I will ask you to write down a quote that stood out to you during the reading that you think is important, and I will ask you to share why you think that quote is important, because I value your voice and perspective. You will use this information (what you write in your notebook) to develop your own personal writing responses for online discussions and for Journal paragraph responses too. I will check your notebooks every Wednesday.
Post-Reading Reflection Discussions (will be posted on Canvas)
15% of your grade
You will engage in one post-reading discussion every week for each unit that will allow you to discuss some of the main ideas and themes of the reading topic and relate it to your personal life experience. In addition, you will practice using the vocabulary from the readings in your post-reading reflection discussion to practice vocabulary fluency. These post-reading reflections will also be prewriting strategies to help prepare you for your paragraph writing assignment tasks, and essay's.
Literacy Journal Reflection (will be posted on Canvas)
15% of your grade
Building from your post-reading discussion responses, you will be assigned to write a paragraph about the unit reading topic and use the vocabulary from the unit reading in your writing to show your understanding and use of the vocabulary, and more importantly share your perspective about the reading topic. The writing tasks will also allow you to practice using different sentence structures and allow you to practice summary, analysis, and synthesis writing.
Sentence Skills & Vocabulary Fluency Exercises (In class)
15% of your grade
To help you develop sentence skills, and vocabulary fluency you will engage in low-stakes sentence skills such as, sentence editing and vocab quizzes once a week. This will allow you to identify your learning strengths and weaknesses and allow you to catch mistakes before you write your end of the unit paragraph or short essay.
Peer Review
10% of your grade
For your major writing assignments, such as essays, I will provide a teacher guided peer review for you and your classmates. The purpose of peer review is to get helpful feedback about how to make your writing better, and clearer for your readers. It is also an opportunity for you to read your classmates' ideas and perspectives about the readings, to enrich your learning experiences in reading and writing collaboratively.
Final Reading & Writing Creative Project
20% of your grade
My teaching philosophy is that competence in an academic subject, such as language and literacy, cannot be fairly measured using standardized testing methods. I believe competence in specific language and literacy skills can be more fairly measured through sustainable practice and repeated experience, and more importantly by asking the learner to pause and reflect on their strengths and limitations in a specific area of learning. Therefore, for your final, at the end of the semester you will choose your favorite unit chapter and reading topic and we will decide as a class how you want to demonstrate your learning in academic reading and writing. Stay tuned for updates!
Participation & Attendance
10% of your grade
What is Participation?
To get the full benefits of learning in this class, it is important for the student to take part in all in-class and online class activities by engaging with the instructor, asking questions, and contributing effort in group work, and online canvas discussions. Participation means you interact with the instructor and peers to help support your learning and our collective learning of certain reading and writing topics. To learn more about attendance policy please see Course Policies (Rules) tab.
Grade Percentage Breakdown
A= 90-100%
B= 80-89%
C= 70-79%
D= 60-69%
F= 0-59%
To learn more about how this class is organized and conducted, including course assignments, access to course calendar, policies, and access to our free online textbook, please click on the far-left menu at the top of this page.