General English Classes

In the integrated skills courses, students will continue to develop their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills using the simple past, past continuous, and future tenses. Students will develop their speaking and listening skills allowing them to carry on basic conversations, obtain goods and services, and extract information from short broadcasts. Students will develop skills in composing, revising, and editing a paragraph. They will write well-developed descriptive and opinion paragraphs. Students will speak intelligibly using their knowledge of syllable stress, silent letters, past tense endings, and intonation.

In the integrated skills courses, students will continue to develop their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills with the narrative tenses. They will also use auxiliary verbs with a special focus on the present and past perfect, learn about phrasal verbs, and be able to express hypothetical situations. Students will develop their speaking and listening skills, allowing them to express their opinions, compare and contrast, and share their feelings about real and imaginary events. The focus of the reading course will be to mark up texts and to identify key facts, sequence events, and summarize information from a text. In the writing class, students will learn to link shorter elements sequentially, narrate a story, and construct three paragraph essays in a variety of formats including cause and effect, persuasive, compare and contrast, argumentative and narrative.

In the integrated skills courses, students will use the future verb tenses (simple future, future progressive, and future perfect) in speaking and writing. They will be able to use auxiliary, modal, and full verbs. In the speaking course, students will interact with others with a degree of fluency and spontaneity on a wide variety of topics. The reading courses will help students understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialization. For writing, students will produce a clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of opinions. They will be able to write a five paragraph problem-solution essay.

As students prepare to transition to academic life, the integrated skills courses will allow students to master a wide range of grammatical structures and use them effectively in speaking and in writing. They will use a wide range of modals, understand idiomatic language, and use linking devices in speaking and writing. Students will learn to restate or discuss topics from a complex presentation as well as present about a subject including an introduction, supporting details, and a conclusion. Students will read and understand a variety of texts and be able to identify explicit or implicit meaning. The reading course will also help them continue to develop their critical thinking skills. Students will transition to academic writing by constructing a research paper on a topic of choice.