2024/2025
English for General Academic Purposes. Proficiency Course – 2
Type:
Optional course
Delivered by:
School of Foreign Languages
When:
3, 4 module
Open to:
students of one campus
Instructors:
Пинчукова Анна Евгеньевна
Language:
English
ECTS credits:
5
Course Syllabus
Abstract
«English for General Academic Purposes. Proficiency Course–2» is designed for first-year HSE undergraduates to enhance their English skills in specialized academic discourses at the proficiency level. In compliance with The Concept of Development of Foreign Language Communicative Competence of HSE University Undergraduate, Specialist and Graduate Students and «Regulations for Interim and Ongoing Assessments of Students at National Research University Higher School of Economics», the course aims at developing English-language communicative, integrated, critical and creative thinking competences. Students should get no less than 75 points as a result of the Midterm Test to join the course. The course comprises three general academic topics crucial for navigating modern sociocultural contexts – biology, humanities, and environmental engineering. Students are expected to master different receptive and productive skills at the C1+ CEFR level, such as understanding and utilizing cohesion in a text, recognizing ambiguity and different speaking styles, making appropriate stylistic choices, understanding text references to visuals and interpreting them, participating in discussions, encouraging participation, preparing and delivering presentations, developing their own ideas, integrating, and producing coherent and cohesive oral and written texts. The acquisition of the skills is checked with the help of written tests (in vocabulary, grammar, reading, and listening), written works (two essay types – opinion and discussion), oral works (a discussion, a presentation, and a monologue), and student independent work in class and at home (participation in discussions and online work on SmartLMS). The offline exam (final assessment) checks students’ ability to deal with reading texts within the academic context and producing comprehensible essays. To successfully master the course, students are encouraged to work independently on SmartLMS. There are no blocking elements of assessment.
Learning Objectives
- - to improve student’s ability to read and understand journal articles, texts, lectures from different perspectives;
- - to increase student’s comprehension of spoken English;
- - to strengthen student’s speaking and writing skills in a range of different disciplines;
- - to systematically and progressively develop students’ academic skills, language, and critical thinking;
- - to provide material for students to revise, consolidate and extend their command of English grammar and vocabulary;
- - to develop students’ reading skills to enable them to skim texts for the main idea, to scan texts for specific information, to interpret texts for inferences, attitudes and styles, to deduce meanings from the context;
- - to develop students’ listening skills to enable them to understand and apply specific information from the input;
- - to develop students’ general capacity to a level that enables them to use English in their professional and academic.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- - to listen to the text using different strategies of understanding the information;
- - to read with a large degree of independence, adapting style and speed of reading to different texts and purposes, and using appropriate sources of information;
- - to express oneself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions;
- - to interact flawlessly and efficiently with another speaker in a dialogue;
- - to know and use advanced vocabulary from the topics of sociology, economics, biology, humanities and environmental engineering;
- - to produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices;
- - to make presentations;
- - to use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes.
- - to write an essay (opinion, discussion);
- - reading: understand cohesion in a text; recognize patterns of cohesion; understand cohesion in descriptions
- - speaking: participate in extended discourse; respond to and discuss controversial topics; utilize interrogatives and declaratives to gain, confirm, and assert support
- - writing: create coherence and cohesion; revise writing; analyze organizational patterns; use language to add cohesion; use outlines and graphic organizers
- - reading: develop reading fluency; increase fluency; recognize ambiguity
- - speaking: recognize speaking styles; identify emphatic argumentation; utilize succinct argumentation; identify and utilize markers for organizational structure; utilize words and phrases to create cohesion in discussions and presentations
- - listening: listen to an academic presentation
- - language skills: understand nominalization; analyze the rhetorical context; use appropriate adverbials to fit the rhetorical context; recognize and use rhetorical techniques
- - reading: understand text references to visuals; refer to visual data within and beyond a reading; identify the purposes of visuals
- - speaking: interpret visuals; connect visuals to a lecture; communicate about the meaning of the visual
- - listening: recognize signposting language to help follow the lecture/talk
- - writing: synthesize text into a visual; use visuals to present information in writing; edit text and visuals; relate visuals to text
- - language skills: recognize and learning multiword vocabulary items; examine sentence structure and subject-verb agreement
Course Contents
- Unit 3: Biology (the science of nature)
- Unit 4: Humanities (arts and letters)
- Unit 5: Environmental engineering (structural science)
Assessment Elements
- Final Assessment (FA)The interim exam lasts 70 minutes. The exam is a written paper-and-pen test and is aimed at checking whether the student can demonstrate the acquisition of the learning objectives set. The exam consists of two parts, i.e. Reading (R) and Writing (W). 1. Reading: Max. 10 points. Students have no more than 20 minutes to complete the Reading part. Read the text. Possible reading tasks: • Correct option for each task (multiple choice). • Fill in the gaps (gap-filling). • Decide whether the statement is True, False or Not Given. 2. Writing: Write an essay on one of the topics given. Max. 10 points. Students should write a 250-word essay. Students have 50 minutes to complete the Writing part. Reading test is assessed as a part of a final work according to the formula R* 0.4 + W*0.6 = 10. Each correct answer is worth one point. Answers containing spelling mistakes are considered incorrect. Writing is assessed against the criteria. The release of examination papers: during the session.
- Written Assessment (WA)Written assessment includes: min 1 reading test, min 1 listening test, min 2 writing tests (opinion essay & discussion essay), min 3 vocabulary and grammar tests.
- Oral Assessment (OA)Oral Assessment includes: min 1 discussion, min 1 presentation, min 1 monologue.
- Student Independent Work Assessment / Online (IWA)Student Independent Work includes class participation during the semester or any other independent activities assigned by the teacher (e.g. homework or mini-projects). Independent work is evaluated on the scale from 0 to 2 points (0 = no work, 1 = satisfactory work, 2 = active/excellent work). The sum of all points is then converted to percentages, which are then converted to a grade (according to the grading scale).
Interim Assessment
- 2024/2025 4th module0.3 * Final Assessment (FA) + 0.2 * Oral Assessment (OA) + 0.25 * Student Independent Work Assessment / Online (IWA) + 0.25 * Written Assessment (WA)
