Students will be able to:

•  understand a wide range of demanding, longer clauses, and recognize implicit meaning.
• express ideas fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions.
•  use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes.
•  produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.

1st Semester

Introduction to the course

The ‘dispensa’

 Ice breaker activity

Topics on current events (accompanied by exercises)

Part 1: Composition writing:  Problem – Solution compositions – Exam practice

Translation Practice: Italian > English (throughout the course)

Common errors/ mistakes to avoid (from students’ work)

Reading Comprehension / Videos & vocabulary exercises (Current event topics followed by discussion  throughout the course)

Verbals:

Gerunds, gerund phrases (position, part of speech, punctuation)

Parallelism in sentence structure- ‘fixing’ unparallel sentences

The Comma (advanced)

Paragraph division

Punctuation (comma, semi-colon, colon, full stop, single and double quotation marks)

Restrictive vs. non-restrictive clauses - clarity in meaning

Vocabulary building – (ex. word formation charts, academic vocabulary)

Modals (common mistakes)

Conditionals and mixed conditionals

Collocations (advanced- binomial/trinomial- strong collocations)

Quantifiers

Each vs. every

Subject-verb agreement (parts of a whole, collective nouns, etc.)

Phrasal verbs (formal vs. informal register – one-word equivalents to build academic vocabulary)

Techniques to reduce wordiness- writing succinct sentences

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2° Semester

Part 2.  Composition writing: Pro and Con compositions- Exam practice

Verbals continued:

To infinitive/ to infinitive phrases (position, part of speech, punctuation)

Participial phrases (position, part of speech, punctuation)

Connectives (linking words)

Story Telling (In preparation for orals)

Part 3: Composition writing. Compare and contrast compositions – exam practice

Position of adverbs

Position of prepositional phrases (and punctuation)

Inversion

Brief review of verb tenses – common problems/ errors / in storytelling

Use of the definite and indefinite articles

Part 4: Opinion compositions- exam practice

Commonly confused words and false friends-  (different/ unique/ job vs. work/ travel vs. trip /etc.) 

Formulating questions correctly (throughout the course)

Dangling and misplaced modifiers

The teaching material prepared by the language assistant in addition to recommended textbooks (such as for instance slides, lecture notes, exercises, bibliography) and communications from the language assistant specific to the course can be found inside the Moodle platform › blended.uniurb.it

Course books

There is a 'dispensa', All other materials and websites recommended and used in class are posted on Blended Learning.