ESL 112 Course Description

Overview: This course is the second course in a two-course sequence for undergraduate international students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The course starts out with a unit on argumentative writing, where students review important concepts covered in 111 (rhetorical situations and strategies, PIE structure, avoiding plagiarism). The main focus of the course is to introduce the students to the practices of research-based writing for American academic audiences, such as developing a research question, searching library databases, creating an annotated bibliography, synthesizing sources, and drafting a research paper. Strategies for avoiding plagiarism will also be practiced in this process. Academic texts are used as a stimulus for discussion of a topic and/or as a source of support in writing assignments. Although oral skills are not the main component of this course, students can expect to practice oral English through group discussions, collaborative writing tasks, and peer review.

Credit: 3 hours

Contact hours: 3 hours

Prerequisite: Students take ESL 112 if they have finished ESL 111.  

Relation to other courses: ESL 112 is the second course in a two-course sequence (ESL 111 and 112) for non-native speakers of English, which fulfills the campus Composition I general education requirement. It is therefore equivalent to Rhetoric 101 or 103.

Grading Basis: Letter grades are based on performance of students on class assignments and participation in class. A passing grade for this course is a grade of “D-” or higher. Grades are recorded on a letter grade scale throughout the semester and on the final transcript.

Student Demographics: Students in this course fall into one of three categories:

1. international students pursuing undergraduate degrees at the U of I (the majority)
2. exchange students from European countries (these students are usually not enrolled for U of I degrees and are the minority)
3. US citizens or permanent residents whose first language is not English but who have gone through US high schools. The oral skills of these students are frequently indistinguishable from those of native speakers; however, their writing skills are much weaker.

Course objectives: Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Write an argumentative essay that effectively incorporates opposing arguments and refutations.
2. Conduct and document effective pre-research, which includes choosing a researchable topic, adjusting the scope of the topic, forming a tentative thesis statement, and outlining.
3. Formulate effective search strategy and retrieve relevant articles located in library databases.  
4. Evaluate sources based on reliability and relevancy.
5. Summarize, synthesize and integrate sources in their writing without plagiarism (by paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing) in APA style.
6. Write a research paper, with support from academic sources, that critiques existing solutions or recommends new solutions for a social issue.

Major Assignments

Unit 1: Argumentative Essay

Unit 2: Pre-research Portfolio

Unit 3: Annotated Bibliography

Unit 4: Problem-solution Research Paper

Required text:  

Hacker, D., Bernhardt, S. A., & Sommers, N. (2011). Writer's help eBook (2.0).