University English Course: English for Academic Writing

INTRODUCTION
This course focuses on improving students' abilities to write academic texts. It teaches students to use a guided strategy for paraphrasing, summarising, and organising the content of written documents. This course also improves students' critical thinking abilities, synthesising and analysing academic texts using a standardised reference or citation style.

AIM
This course aims to develop students’ ability to write academic texts as well as synthesise and analyse academic texts using a reference format.

OUTCOMES
At the end of the course, the participants should be able to demonstrate the competence to construct an annotated bibliography; improve the ability to find and handle relevant material; as well as synthesise relevant information on current issues to create a written report within academic discourse.

TARGETED PARTICIPANTS
1. UiTM degree students

TOPICS
1. Using different paraphrase tactics in academic writing, including synonyms, passive voice, varied sentence patterns, order of ideas, retelling and chunking methods, as well as making abstract ideas more concrete.
2. Using the APA format to document sources, including citing sources within a text and writing references for different types of sources.
3. Writing annotated bibliographies, including paraphrasing, summarising, analysing, evaluating, and identifying the main ideas, supporting details, organisational patterns, author’s purpose, tone and intended audience, reasoning, types of support, as well as recognising strengths and weaknesses in authors’ arguments (relevance, validity, reliability, objectivity, and completeness).
4. Analysing academic texts, including researching and collecting materials, analysing and identifying main ideas, supporting details, and organisational patterns, determining the authors’ purpose, intended audience, tone and bias, drawing conclusions, writing outlines, as well as using accurate language.
5. Evaluating and synthesising information from academic texts, writing term papers, as well as citing and quoting sources correctly to avoid plagiarism.

RESOURCES
Core
1. https://www.wecwi.com/blog/tags/academic-english
Supplementary
1. https://www.wecwi.com/post/seleh

ASSESSMENTS
1. Annotated Bibliography︱30%︱2 hours 30 minutes︱Week 7
2. Article Analysis︱30%︱2 weeks︱Weeks 9-10
a. Outline of Article Analysis︱15%
b. Oral Presentation︱10%︱20 minutes
c. e-Poster︱5%
3. Term Paper︱40%︱3-4 weeks︱Weeks 12-14
a. Draft of Term Paper︱10%
b. Term Paper︱25%
c. Portfolio︱5%