Course

Advanced Practical Writing for English Language Learners

Faculty
Language, Literature & Performing Arts
Department
English Language Learning and Acquisition
Course Code
ELLA 0370
Credits
3.00
Semester Length
15 weeks
Max Class Size
18
Method(s) Of Instruction
Seminar
Typically Offered
To be determined

Overview

Course Description
This is a general purpose writing course for students with some experience in writing English. It is designed for students who wish to upgrade their overall writing skills for personal, work-related or academic purposes. Students will write personal letters, notices, reports for school and work, resumes, and routine business correspondence. Students will also receive practice in proofreading for major errors of sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary.
Course Content

The learning activities will be determined by students’ needs and interests, but instructors will choose tasks from the following list:

  1. Personal notes, letters, notices and announcements:
    • explanations, arrangements, instructions, inquiries, requests, apologies, invitations, acceptances and refusals, congratulations, condolences, thank you’s, complaints, opinion, etc.
  2. Academic or work-related reports:
    • case studies
    • accounts of incidents or events
    • biographical summaries
    • process descriptions
    • problem-solving reports
    • progress reports
    • evaluative reports
  3. Resumes, covering letters and letters of application
  4. Other work-related communications:
    • routine business correspondence and memos
    • agendas, notes of meetings, minutes
  5. Editing and proofreading techniques
Learning Activities

The instructor will facilitate, observe and evaluate students’ participation in writing activities.  Whole and small group instruction will be combined with individual assistance and student directed learning.  Students will participate in the setting of goals by identifying their communicative and language development needs, and will participate in the selection of learning activities.

Means of Assessment

A mastery model of on-going evaluation will be used.  A student will reach mastery when s/he has demonstrated through satisfactory completion of exercises, assignments and other assessments that the course objectives have been achieved.

Where formal tests of specific skills are used, mastery will be defined as a score of 70% or more.

Progress will be monitored on a regular basis by the instructor in consultation with each student.

Learning Outcomes

Within relevant educational, employment, personal and social contexts, students will:

  1. compose correspondence and notices for a variety of personal needs and interests
  2. prepare accounts of events and reports for a variety of purposes, using data, observation or experience.
  3. prepare resumes and job application letters.
  4. compose and respond appropriately to a variety of work-related communications.
  5. write comprehensibly.
Textbook Materials

Materials will be supplied.

Students may be required to purchase a text.

Requisites

Prerequisites

ELLA 0260, EASL 0275 or instructor permission

Corequisites

No corequisite courses.

Equivalencies

No equivalent courses.

Course Guidelines

Course Guidelines for previous years are viewable by selecting the version desired. If you took this course and do not see a listing for the starting semester / year of the course, consider the previous version as the applicable version.

(Current)

Course Transfers

These are for current course guidelines only. For a full list of archived courses please see https://www.bctransferguide.ca

Institution Transfer Details for ELLA 0370
There are no applicable transfer credits for this course.

Course Offerings

Winter 2025