Upcoming courses for graduate students who are non-native speakers of English
The School of Graduate Studies/English Language and Writing Support (ELWS) provides graduate students with advanced training in academic writing and speaking. Listed below are upcoming courses for graduate students who are non-native speakers of English.
Academic Writing 1: Focus on Fundamentals
This class is designed for non-native speakers of English who wish to improve the overall quality of their academic writing. Students will learn to improve the formality of their writing; to make claims commensurate with their evidence; to create coherent paragraphs; to use outlines to build sound structure; to understand the correct use of verb tense in academic writing; and, overall, to see how academic writing in their new context may differ from writing they have done in the past. The overall goal of the class is to show graduate students some key strategies to improve their academic writing. Course Duration: 6 weeks
This free non-credit course will be held on Thursdays from 1:00 to 3:00, March 1st to April 5th
Academic Writing 2: Focus on Grammar
This course is designed for non-native speakers of English who need to improve the grammatical correctness of their written academic work. This course focuses on helping graduate students to self-diagnose their most common grammatical errors, to apply the key grammatical rules learned throughout the course, to develop strategies to enhance grammatical correctness, and to identify resources for improving their grammar. Specific topic areas covered in the course include maintaining subject-verb agreement, minimizing article errors, using relative clauses correctly, avoiding punctuation errors, and clarifying incorrect or vague pronoun references. Students will be expected to submit their writing for individual feedback. Course Duration: 6 weeks
This free non-credit course runs will be held on Fridays from 10:00 to 12:00, March 2nd to April 13th (note: there is no class on April 6th).
Academic Writing 3: Focus on Style
This course differs from the others in the Academic Writing series in that it looks at the advanced stylistic challenges faced by multilingual graduate students. Specifically, the course helps non-native speakers of English engage with higher-level writing issues beyond sentence level or grammar considerations. Among the questions we’ll be dealing with are the following: What strategies can writers use to produce smooth, readable texts that guide the reader from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph, and from chapter to chapter? How can writers incorporate the work and ideas of other scholars into their own work without losing their own “voices” or risking plagiarism? How can academics writers influence how readers will receive their work? How can the twin “evils” of repetition and redundancy be recognized and avoided? Academic Writing 3: Focus on Style assumes that students already have a solid command of English grammar, and that they already understand the types of writing called for in graduate school. In general, we recommend that students take Academic Writing 1: Focus on Fundamentals before tackling this course.
Course duration: 6 weeks.
This free non-credit course runs will be held on Tuesdays from 10:00 to 12:00, February 28th to April 3rd.
Registration procedures for all 3 courses can be found on the ELWS website at: http://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/informationfor/students/english/courses/registration.htm#regist.
Please note that enrolment is limited in order to maintain a desirable teacher-student ratio.