Course Descriptions—Interpretation of the Academic Achievement Scale

ELI 031 Academic Reading:

By the end of this course, students will be able to understand readings of at least 600 words of academic text with Level 3 grammar and vocabulary. They will be able to predict content; scan for specific information; identify thesis and paragraph main ideas; understand comparisons and contrasts and cause and effect, recognize facts, assumptions, and opinions; and infer meaning. They will be able to make critical responses. They will be able to guess vocabulary meaning from context, and know and apply new vocabulary.

ELI 032 Speaking & Listening Skills:

By the end of this course, students will be able to speak with good fluency to express themselves about non-academic and somewhat academic topics. They will be able to have conversations and discussions in groups and use some turn-taking language. They will be able to give short presentations with partners and individually, using good body language and basic visual aids. They will be able to describe, give examples, make comparisons, and persuade, and use good pronunciation of word sounds and sentence stress and intonation. Students will apply listening skills to understand classroom language and recordings of conversations and short lectures. They will understand speech that is slightly slower than natural speech and at an intermediate language level. They will be able to answer questions on the conversations and take notes in guided outlines on the lectures by listening for main ideas and specific details, definitions, and signposting. Students will know vocabulary in the context of the recordings and apply it in speaking activities.

ELI 033 Grammar: Using English Accurately:

By the end of this course, students will know the form, meaning, and pronunciation of the grammar of verb tenses including past perfect, and relative clauses. Students will be able to apply this knowledge in speaking in groups and individually, and writing letters and paragraphs of at least 100 words.

ELI 034 Academic Writing:

By the end of this course, students will be able to write academic essays of at least 250 words organized in a standard format, with an introduction (with background and thesis), body paragraphs (with topic sentence), and conclusion, including an outline. They will be able to brainstorm and write content for descriptive, comparison, opinion, narrative essays. They will be able to use verb tenses, including narrative tenses; simple, compound, and complex sentence structure; and language for the essay content. They will be able to revise their work based on feedback and self-editing.