Reading and Writing in an Academic Context

Catalog description

Designed as an entry point for other first-year writing courses at Carnegie Mellon, 76100 is an academic reading and writing course for multilingual students which offers a space for learners to recognize and use the communicative strengths that are created by knowing two or more languages. Experiences in the course give students the opportunity to draw on multiple cultural and linguistic understandings and practices when analyzing and creating meaningful texts. The course emphasizes critical reading and research strategies for a variety of sources which become the basis for individually and collaborativelyproduced texts. The course introduces students to rhetorical choices within and across languages at the sentence, paragraph, and whole text or genre levels. Students will explore a variety of practices in academic writing (e.g., paraphrase, synthesis, counterargument and refutation, citation) as they relate to genre, audience, purpose, and other factors of a communicative situation. We discuss and practice explicit rhetorical and linguistic conventions for writing in academic English so that writers make choices to connect with readers in academic and professional discourse communities. Students who take this course identify as multilingual students who use English skillfully but perhaps with less comfort as they use another language. These students complete an online placement process that guides them through making their own informed course placement. Students may also skip the placement process and enroll directly into the course. For some students, 76100 is a prerequisite requirement for other first-year writing courses; therefore, students should check with their academic advisors regarding how 76100 fulfills their general education course requirements. All 76100 courses are structured by the learning objectives shared across sections of the course, but…