Current Teaching
Academic Reading 1,2
This course is taught in tandem with Concept Building and Discussion 1,2 above and completes the English curriculum for second-year students at the School of Science and Engineering. The emphasis is on preparing students to read the academic texts they will be required to read in their specializations in their advanced years while also encouraging them to begin reading authentic STEM texts as soon as possible. Although nominally a reading course, the design emphasizes the four skills by making students write about what they have read, talk about what they have read, and listen to others talk about what they have read. The course is supported by a coursebook written with university-level STEM students in mind.
Special Topics in Functional English: Spoken fluency measurement and development
This course takes a theoretical and practical approach to second language fluency. Students examine what fluency is, develop their own definition of it, design a method to improve their own fluency with respect to their definition, and then implement the method over several weeks. The course explores various aspects of fluency through practical activities and in-class experiments. While the course is focused on second language fluency in speech contexts, some time is spent thinking about fluency in other ways (e.g., pathological disfluency, fluency in reading/writing, and cognitive fluency in human psychology).
Concept Building and Discussion 1,2
This course is required for all second-year students at the School of Science and Engineering. It is designed to get students to use English for academic purposes in a task-oriented setting allowing for both and spoken and written language production. Students engage in various research projects, negotiating the progress of these projects with others and then reporting on the results in both spoken presentation as well as written reports.
Advanced Technical Presentation
This course is designed for graduate-level science and engineering students, many of whom are beginning to make regular trips to conferences in order to report on their graduate research. This course is designed to help them better prepare for these presentations by teaching various skills related to presentation in general and presentation of technical data in particular. Students prepare and make two major presentations during the academic term, but also prepare and give several additional presentations included presentation videos and poster presentations.