ESL Course Descriptions

English as a Second Language (2009-2010)

This language skills course for non-Anglophones offers an exploration of forms and meanings of Canadian English in academic, workplace, and social contexts. Topics are events, issues and situations that Canadians face in everyday life. Students will strengthen their language skills, increase their vocabulary, and learn how to adapt their formal knowledge of English to real-life situations.

This course teaches the organizational, vocal, listening, and critical skills required for oral communications. It features intensive work on spoken English in all contexts, from conventional gambits to public speaking, including an emphasis on phonology and prosody to improve comprehensibility. Minimum of four hours of instruction each week.

This course offers sentence-level instruction in grammar and idiom to teach students to produce, evaluate, and edit writing under time constraints. It emphasizes readability and error reduction in sentences and paragraphs. Minimum of five hours of instruction each week.

This writing skills course is open only to students whose first language is not English. It provides instruction in basic grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, elements of composition and essay writing including a focus on theme, development of central ideas, exposition and argumentation.