This course introduces the listening and speaking skills needed to succeed at an American university. Areas covered include pronunciation and fluency, critical thinking and listening strategies, in class and lecture note taking, class discussion and presentations, and vocabulary building.

This course focuses on writing effective academic paragraphs. Students learn the distinction between informal and academic writing, academic paragraph format and organization, and essential steps of the writing process. Students also learn to produce paragraphs in the rhetorical styles of narration, description, and process (and possibly opinion or example if time permits). Students will be introduced to the concepts of logical division of ideas, coherence, and transition signals. Students are expected to demonstrate improvement in spelling and vocabulary, punctuation, and grammar.

Students will show competency in the use of the present and past, including progressive forms of these tenses as well as recognize the use of the simple future tense. In addition, basic modal verbs are introduced to practice expressions related to possibility, ability, and asking for permission.

This course introduces the reading skills and vocabulary needed to succeed at an American university. Areas covered include developing vocabulary skills; identifying and using critical thinking, reading and vocabulary strategies; using rapid reading practices; and applying all strategies and vocabulary to reading comprehension and independent reading.

Instruct students in a variety of strategies that will help them achieve academic goals and be successful university students. Strategies will include: learning how they learn best, maximizing available resources, learning self-management and personal responsibility, and learning academic honesty.

Primary focus is: learning to differentiate between statements and questions, fact and opinion, identifying main ideas, listening for a speaker's point of view, and note-taking techniques for academic classes.

Primary focus is: the paragraph level of writing. This includes the steps of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, and revising, organizational patterns, such as chronological and spatial order, transition signals and description.

Primary focus is: the present tense of verbs, past tense, future tense, pronouns, including demonstratives, regular and irregular verbs, count and non-count nouns and prepositions.

Primary focus is: learning new vocabulary, focusing on contextual clues, reading skills like previewing, predicting, skimming, and scanning, sequencing ideas and demonstrating ability to differentiate between fact and opinion.