C1+ - advanced C1

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.

perfecting their C1 level of English and preparing for the successive C2 level course

1st Semester:

- Intro. to the course - description of exam- general message to all students

- Current events: various topics of interest (accompanied by exercises)

- Repairing run-on sentences (comma splice)

- Review of common errors (examples of past students' work)

- Rules of capitalization in titles

- Essay writing

- Parallelism in sentence structure

- The scientific research article abstract- functional moves (breaking down the RA into f.moves_ Swales and Feak _ Abstracts and the Writing of Abstracts - U. of Michigan Press

- Creation of our own corpus of abstracts in the fields of Education/ Translation/ Child Psychology/ etc.

- Analysis of RA abstracts

- Presentation and overview of important websites: Owl at Purdue/ Townson/ etc. (online writing labs)

- Avoiding wordiness - writing 'clean' sentences

- Vocabulary building exercises (throughout course)

   word formation charts

   phrasal verb > one word equivalent

   formal phrasal verbs

    reporting verbs / reporting nouns (w/ generic verb) - advance

    avoiding 'very'

- Punctuation (comma, colon, semi-colon) advanced exercises

- Advanced conditionals

- Review of modals - common mistakes

- Adverbial phrases

- Advanced conditionals and mixed conditionals (modal use-common mistakes)

- Dangling and misplaced modifiers

- Inversion- advanced examples

- Verbals: gerunds/gerund phrases /participial phrases/to infinitive phrases

- Position of adverbs 

- Position of prepositional phrases

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2nd Semester

Topics (accompanied by exercises)

- Subject-verb agreement (common problems)

- The Subjunctive ('were to' conditional structure)

- Preparing teaching materials: reading comprehension evaluation - formulating various types of exercises/ questions  

- Advanced collocations

- Discussing short stories

- Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive clauses (punctuation)

- Collocations (also binomial  and trinomial)

- Using more formal language (academic vocabulary)

- More on abstracts 

   'that' clauses 

    titles/conclusions

   final sentences

- Verbals continued (participial phrases)

- Adjectives (order of)

- Prepositional phrases (order of)

- Appositives

- Pronunciation. 'ed' endings,  -uation, etc.

- Analysis of RA abstracts

- More on preparing teaching materials ( various types of exercises: cloze, multiple-choice, true/false, etc.)

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Throughout the program:

- Videos and readings followed by  class discussions and / or comprehension and / or vocabulary building exercises

(current event topics / biographies/ education / the arts / translation /language studies/ interviews

- Exam practice (C1+/ C2)

- Correction of peer work and paragraphs (advanced-mixed)

- Opinion compositions

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

- A booklet on Essay Writing with exercises to download from the platform

- A self study exercise book on academic vocabulary is to be downloaded (see General Message to New Students for link)

Please note: numerous websites are used for grammar and use of English. There is no grammar textbook.

Students must use their institutional email address when writng to me  and indicate DIRI 1 as their course.