Course Objectives

Through focusing on the reading aspect of the above description by using multi-paragraph texts, the course aims to develop and improve students’ reading & writing skills in English, whilst increasing their active and passive vocabulary.  This will enable them to read and summarize English business texts, with increased confidence and understanding. The writing component will include the productions of different types of paragraphs covering discourse functions encountered in a business administration environment.

1. Reading Competencies

In order to achieve the aims of the course, students will be expected to practice and apply the following skills:

·         reading extensively and intensively

·         reading quickly and silently

·         skimming for meaning

·         scanning for specific information

·         inferring meaning

·         predicting outcomes

·         recognizing, and writing about, the main idea(s) of/in a text (summarizing)

·         using a dictionary effectively

2. Writing Objectives

§  Upon completion of the course, students should be able to write with confidence different types of paragraphs from the pre-writing stages to the editing stages. The course also emphasizes correctness of expression, together with precision and clarity beyond the sentence level to produce portions of language which hang together as a whole (cohesive paragraphs).

§  Coverage of the writing tasks introduced in the first seven units of the book (Types of business correspondence supports, résumés, covering letters, functional letters and memoranda).