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Instructors: Michael A.C. Claridge
Event type:
Practice class
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.311
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 35
Registration group: WE II 311
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
Building on the writing skills you acquired in “Written English I”, small-team analysis and discussion of a set of prepared tasks will refresh your understanding of the key elements of an effective academic essay, explore different rhetorical strategies that can be used when responding to a literary or cultural-studies text, and further refine your skills in first identifying the nature of the task – i.e. what your reader will be expecting from you – and then drawing up and using an plan to aid you in preparing to write such an essay. Writing tasks along the way will help you internalise these and other tools and skills, while peer-to-peer feedback within your team will refine your ‘critical eye’ regarding content, structure and language appropriateness & accuracy. including eradicating interference from German (and any other languages!) when writing (in) English.
Content-wise, we will consider how to respond to a literature or cultural-studies text and then package your ideas in essay form in a manner that can persuade the READER of your line of argumentation: YOUR view is perfectly ok, as long as you can adequately and effectively support it, especially from the primary text(s)! Such a READER focus will be the central aim of our course, in terms of content, structure and language.
All this work will be paralleled by your in-depth reading during the semester of one from a selection of medium-length novels. You will apply the skills developed in the course of the semester to draw up two plans for a topic given you on your chosen novel, one for a narrative/informative/descriptive-type essay, one for an argumentative/persuasive-type essay; the latter will be the focus for the final writing assignment (just the plan for the Studienleistung; plan plus essay for the module exam).
You will be expected to have access to one of the better monolingual English learners’ dictionaries, either in print form or on your device or online. The best two are currently the Longman/Langenscheidt Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Oxford University Press Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Other material will be made available via LMS in the course of the semester. I am assuming you have mastered how to quote and also how to appropriately write and format a bibliography in a literature-studies/cultural-studies essay from earlier classes/modules. You will be permitted to use one monolingual dictionary (PRINT format ONLY) in the two mini-tests and the final test, so it is advisable to get to know your way around your dictionary as soon as possible.
At the time of writing (January), I am assuming that we will be meeting physically in a real classroom. You will prepare for in-class sessions by working in teams between the formal in-class sessions, meeting physically if possible, online if not, to develop a team solution for the tasks for each week. One member of each team will email this to me, and I will combine the various proposals to create a worksheet for the full-class discussion. I will let you know during the first week which team you are in; part of the time in the first in-class session will be devoted to team organisation regarding where and how you meet each week. I will inform you in the first in-class session as to how the two short tests will be conducted; the nature of the final test will also depend on what is permitted, which is unclear at this point.
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