Course syllabus

SEMESTER 2, 2017
Course Information

• Course Coordinator and teacher

Rosemary Wette - r.wette@auckland.ac.nz

• Course delivery format

2 hours of lectures (Monday 4-6 pm)

(Timetable and room details can be viewed on Student Services Online)

Summary of Course Description              

Developing academic literacy skills involves building knowledge and skill in three main areas: technical aspects (e.g. summarizing, paraphrasing, sentence and paragraph level word choices, frequently used language patterns); disciplinary components (e.g. how texts are constructed in your particular subject area); and critical components (e.g. issues of access, power, identity and social practices). While all three will feature in LANGTCHG 715, the main focus of the course will be to further develop the language and genre-based skills that you will need to comprehend, organise and produce particular types of texts in your graduate studies. The course is organised around these important academic genres: evaluative texts (e.g. academic essays and reviews) and research reports (e.g. library research reports in essays, and empirical reports in theses and dissertations). There is a particular focus on the various kinds of metadiscourse strategies that writers use to organise information coherently and convincingly in the text, and to convey the writer’s own perspective through the use of strategies such as hedges, boosters, and attitude markers. We also look at what corpus-based analyses reveal about language use in particular disciplinary areas.

 Each class session includes discussion of a course reading that relates to the topic of the session, some explicit instruction about the genre, analysis of sample texts and the type of language typically used, as well as opportunities to receive feedback on practice tasks. The course has three assignments.

Course outcomes

By the end of the course, students should…

• have gained an understanding of academic literacies: macro-structures, language patterns and prefabricated text chunks
• be able to critically reflect on and evaluate the structure and style of academic texts
• have improved their ability to write accurate academic English in a style appropriate to a particular task and context
  

Weekly Topics:

1. Introduction
2. Evaluative writing and argumentation
3. Paraphrases and summaries
4. Synthesizing and citing sources
5. Composing and editing processes
6. Introductions and literature reviews
7. Collecting, presenting and commenting on data
8. Discussions and conclusions

 Prescribed Texts:

All course notes and tasks will be provided in a LT 715 course text.

 Recommended Texts:

 Readings will be available through Canvas (Course readings).

Workload:

The University of Auckland's expectation on 15-point courses, is that students spend 10 hours per week on the course. Students manage their academic workload and other commitments accordingly. Students attend two hours of lectures each week, which leaves 8 hours for reading and assignment preparation.

Deadlines and submission of coursework:

Deadlines for coursework are non-negotiable. In extreme circumstances, such as illness, you may seek an extension but you will be required to provide a doctor's certificate before the assignment is due. All late assignments without a pre-approved extension will be penalised one mark per day late.