Effective Reading and Summary Writing in English – ZIP 0508-ERSWE-OG-ZIP
Classes are offered as part of the Integrated Action Programme for the Development of the University of Warsaw, co-financed from the European Social Fund under POWER 3.5. The rules for the use of general university courses for PhD students in the ZIP (UW PhD Students' Regulations) are available at: www.zip.uw.edu.pl
This course is addressed to PhD students who want to improve their reading and writing skills, especially in the area of identifying the most relevant fragments of academic texts, paraphrasing the original text, avoiding plagiarism and preparing clear and informative summaries. It aims at providing students with greater confidence in dealing with academic texts and preparing abstracts.
Module 1
Effective reading strategies: surveying, skimming, scanning the text, recognizing the style and structure; identifying topic sentences.
Module 2
Intensive reading, analyzing the structure of the text, identifying most relevant fragments, rephrasing.
Module 3
Text analysis, continued. Academic vocabulary development, rephrasing, inferring the meaning from the context.
Module 4
Preparing the outline for the summary, assisted and unassisted, avoiding plagiarism.
Module 5
Rules for summary writing, assessing summaries, analyzing the language of summaries. Drafting and assisted summary writing.
Module 6
Unassisted summary writing. Presentation and analysis of individual summaries. Peer-revising and editing summaries.
Module 7 (online module)
Elaboration, revision and consolidation of the course materials
Type of course
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
Graduates of the course
Knowledge:
- have knowledge of effective reading strategies
- recognize the importance of identifying relevant fragments of the text
- have awareness of the necessity of paraphrasing
- remember the rules for writing summary outlines and summaries proper
Skills:
- identify the structure and style of academic texts
- paraphrase the relevant fragments for further use
- prepare the outline for the summary
- write clear and comprehensive summaries
Social competences:
- demonstrate their understanding of longer texts in a discussion
- demonstrate briefly and coherently their own research and academic projects
- engage actively in a discussion providing arguments based on academic texts while avoiding plagiarism and lengthy quotations
Assessment criteria
Grading: F2F and online activity, written in-class test
The final grade will be based on:
Written tests: 50%
In-class participation: 30%
Online participation: 20%
Bibliography
Selected online materials.
French, A. & Nicoll, P. (2010) Effective Reading. Macmillan.
Hewings, M. (2012). Cambridge Academic English. Cambridge University Press. Effective writing in English.Springer.
Macpherson, R. (2004). English for Academic Purposes. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN
Morley, J. (2014). Academic phrasebank. Manchester: University of Manchester.[online] Available at: http://www. phrasebank. manchester. ac.uk
Sowton, C. (2012). 50 steps to improving your academic writing: study book. Garnet Publishing.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: