Level 4 Korean A

Catalog description

This is a four-credit writing intensive course designed for students who have completed Level Three Korean B ( KOR 402 ) or the equivalent. The course aims to further improve students' proficiency in all four language skills, with a special emphasis on writing. By exploring a wide range of topics on Korean popular culture and issues in modern Korea through selected various authentic materials, students will engage in a substantial amount of writing, editing, and revising in Korean. As a writing-focused course, this course will involve in-class and out-of-class writings entirely in Korean that aim to show students how to use writing as a form of both thinking and developing Korean proficiency, as a way to invent and/or build up new ideas, and as ways of organizing their thought in ways that allow them to communicate those ideas effectively to others entirely in Korean. Students will be assigned bi-weekly writing assignments of different genres on the topics that are covered by each lesson. The final project of the course will be a writing-based research project in Korean; the leadup to that project will involve significant discussion of academic writing style as well as the use of writing to help develop the research abilities and critical thinking. The course will cover various topics on Korean culture and issues in modern Korea that are selected from authentic materials such as newspaper articles, essays, TV programs, movies, and short stories. Thus, students will be exposed to various genres and different writing styles in Korean. This will allow students not only to develop writing proficiency in Korean in that what kinds of speech styles should be appropriately selected (among the many that have been learned) but also to gain greater knowledge of Korean culture and a deeper awareness of the role of culture and social behavior and to hone intercultural competence and critical thinking.