First-Year Writing Program Course Descriptions:

EAP 121  English for Academic Purposes (For Non-Native Speakers of English)
This high intermediate “content-based” ESOL course reviews sentence structure and works towards perfecting English paragraph composition. Students learn to draft simple narratives. Journals are required in response to all readings, which are carefully selected literary pieces on sociological topics. The course stresses grammar, reading, and writing skills development, using readings that emphasize sociological themes, situations, and terminology.

EAP 131  Advanced English for Academic Purposes (For Non-Native Speakers of English)
This course is the second and last in the English Department’s ESOL sequence. It prepares students for ENG 100 and ENG 101 by offering intensive instruction in grammar, reading, and writing skills development. The course incorporates readings with criminal justice themes and asks students to analyze them both orally and in writing. Students will progress from simple to more sophisticated narratives and ultimately write an argumentative essay.

ENGW 100  Inquires in Literacy: A Writing-Intensive Course in the Issues and Practices of Literacy
This course introduces students to the literacy skills, habits, and conventions necessary to success at the college-level work. While offering students techniques and practice of invention and revision, the course also teaches the students the historical, educational, or literary aspects of literacy as a scholarly topic. For example, students may study issues of prison literacy, educational policies of literacy, or representations of literacy in literature.

ENG 101  Exploration and Authorship: An Inquiry-based Writing Course
This course introduces students to the skills, habits, and conventions necessary to prepare inquiry-based research for college. While offering students techniques and practices of invention and revision, this theme-based composition course teaches students the expectations of college-level research, academic devices for exploring ideas, and rhetorical strategies for completing investigative writing. Students prepare a sequence of prescribed assignments that culminate in a final research paper. These assignments provide small manageable task that explore the process of the normally overwhelming research paper. The course grade is based on the quality of revised writing in a final portfolio.

ENG 201  Disciplinary Investigations: Exploring Writing across the Disciplines
This introduces students to the rhetorical characteristics and writing styles from across the disciplines. Instructors choose a single theme and provide students with reading and writing assignments that address the differing literacy conventions and processes of diverse fields. Students learn how to apply their accumulated repertoire of aptitudes and abilities to the writing situations presented to them from across the disciplines.

Writing Program Curriculum Requirements (ENG 101 and 201)

Both courses require a portfolio to be handed in at the end of the course.  The portfolio can be digital or hard-copy.  The portfolio should include final versions of required assignments, but should also include less formal assignments that show the students’ writing process.  The portfolio should also include reflective writing assignments from throughout the course, not just the final reflective writing assignment (cover letter).

ENG 101 Prescribed Assignments

Note:  All assignments should be listed on the syllabus. They do not have to be completed in this order.  The assignments are intentionally open-ended.  Faculty should develop versions of the assignment that facilitate their particular course/student needs.

• A Descriptive Letter or piece of Creative Non-fiction that addresses the theme of the course.
• A Proposal that provides an inquiry-based question(s), details a methodology for working with the question
• An Annotated Bibliography that identifies and discusses the expert discourse that surrounds the inquiry topic/research question.
• A First Draft that messily lays out students’ ideas about their proposed topic
• A Working Outline that designates the organization of their developing paper
• A Scripted Interview that asks students to choose two authors they cite in their essay and compose a hypothetical interview. Acting as a participating interviewer, students must pose questions that both ask these expert voices to inform questions about their topic as well as elicit discussion between the two expert authors.  Alternatively, this can be a real interview, related to the inquiry, where the student scripts the questions.
• Redrafts of their inquiry-based paper that accumulates evidence, organizational strategies, and synthesis of ideas that they have deduced/induced from their work on the various scaffolded assignments.
• A Cover Letter written to their second-semester composition instructor which explains their profile as a writer: what were their writing aptitudes like when they entered the first semester course, what they learned/improved about their writing, and what challenges they plan to work on in their upcoming writing course. Alternatively, this can be a reflective essay, where the student discusses his/her own work in the course, with a rhetorical emphasis.

ENG 201 Requirements

While ENG 201 does not have prescribed assignments the following are highly recommended.

1. A reflective writing/rhetorical analysis assignment that asks students to review, analyze and/or “revision” the work they did for their 101 portfolio.
2. A list of key rhetorical terms and theories that students use to discuss their own and others’ work.
3. Writing projects in at least three different genres/disciplines.
4. A rhetorical analysis essay/exam at the end of the course. This can be seen as a more substantial version of the course-ending reflective letter in ENG 101.

Resources:

Word doc: course descriptions

pdf: Writing Program Learning Objectives for EAP 121, EAP 131 and ENGW 100NNEW: writing program preview

Word doc: curriculum requirements for ENG 101 and ENG 201. Writing Program Curriculum Requirements