ESL: Port of Entry Full-Time Program High-Intermediate
This is the high intermediate course designed to provide non-native students with the academic, linguistic, verbal, aural, and note-taking skills necessary to succeed on the TOEFL exam and in higher education. This course offers content-based lectures and discussion skills that are important parts of academic success. Students will become familiar with key words from the Academic Word List which ensures that they learn vocabulary that will be useful regardless of what major they decide on later. This course also helps students to develop a style of note-taking that works best for them.
Students in this class will study the following topics in English grammar:
- The Future tense: review and expansion
- Gerunds and infinitives
- Adjective clauses
- The passive voice
- Conditional sentences, both real and unreal
- Indirect speech and embedded questions
Supplemental lessons will be given in English writing in the following skills:
- Editing for verb forms
- Avoiding sentence fragments
- Using parallel forms with gerunds and infinitives
- Adding details with adjective clauses
- Changing the focus using the passive voice
- Using direct and indirect speech
In Listening and Speaking class, academic topics will include: Cultural Anthropology; Psychology; Media Studies, Education, History, Business Administration, Public Health, and others.
Vocabulary
- all vocabulary is chosen to reflect the academic corpus
Projects
- Research product names
- Research words borrowed from English
- Conduct a survey and creating a database
- Distinguish English phonemes
- Research immigrant populations: the census
- Research cultural differences in business
- Learn how to summarize and paraphrase avoiding plagiarism
- Determine cause and effect with global warming
- Research gene-environment interaction and DNA
- Evaluate food projects for allergens
- Research the ring of fire volcano belt
Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
- Identify main ideas
- Use signal words to organize notes
- Note and explain key words
- Create topic headings and indent subtopics
- Note supporting details below main ideas
- Make columns to note date and numbers
- Use symbols and abbreviations
- Make numbered lists
- Take notes to show cause and effect
- Cluster related ideas in a web or with brackets and arrows
- Write down questions during lectures
- Activate prior knowledge and connect topic to personal experiences and beliefs
- Share and expand upon ideas with fellow classmates
- Become familiar with key content words and phrases from the Academic Word List
- Focus on form while learning new words and collocations
- Recognize strategies for listening actively and taking clear notes
- Use symbols and abbreviations
- Make oral presentations (spontaneous and rehearsed)
