English Grammar and Exercise (with Dept. Biosciences)

Course ID:  M3B011BF

Credits: 2

Course Prerequisites: 

No pre course is required. However, since this course is not meant for the absolute beginner, students had better have reached at least an intermediate level of proficiency in English. (What is emphasized here is the resolution to promote English proficiency in reading and, especially, writing. It is required to spend at least 6 hours per week on practice off class.) 

Course Description and Goals:

The course aims to help students acquire the ability to read and write college-level reading materials fluently. In class, the instructor will introduce a variety of sentence combining and expanding techniques—including grammar, usage, and punctuation; then, students, provided with follow-up exercises, will be asked to apply these techniques to produce more specific, concise and fluent sentences. By the end of this course, through abundant sentence-combining practice, students are expected to be able to use a variety of ways to express their ideas out onto the page in clear and coherent English.

Schedule Type:  

Composing and Combining: Drafting, Playing with Sentence

Revising Sentences: Coordination and Subordination, Relative Clauses, Appositives, Participles, Absolutes, Prepositional Phrases and Infinitive Phrases, Noun Substitutes

Revising Whole Drafts: Coherence and Cohesion, Paragraph Patterns, Using Details