Effective Reading and Summary Writing in English – ZIP

ogólnouniwersyteckie

Participation in the course requires signing of a Declaration of Project Participant and Statement of Project Participant (during first class meeting). Resignation from the course during the semester results in the need to reimbursing ZIP for the tokens used to register for the course.

Formal requirement: B2+ English

Formal requirement: B2+ English

This course is intended to develop doctoral students’ skills necessary for effective reading and summary writing by providing information on reading strategies as well as rules for writing outlines and summaries. It gives the participants practical opportunities to analyse academic texts, develop their vocabulary and prepare summaries.

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.

Start Off Module

Effective reading strategies: surveying, skimming, scanning, reading for detail. Introductory information about the nature of summarizing.

Module 1

Recognizing the style and structure; identifying topic sentences. Analyzing the structure of the text, identifying most relevant fragments, rephrasing. Preparing the outline for the summary (assisted).

Module 2

Text analysis, continued. Academic vocabulary development, rephrasing, inferring the meaning from the context. Preparing a summary – filling in the gaps in the summary (assisted).

Module 3

Preparing the outline for the summary - unassisted, analyzing the paragraph structure; avoiding plagiarism.

Module 4

Unassisted summary writing. Presentation and analysis of individual summaries.

Online learning workshop: 29 hours of online asynchronous instruction, One-hour online synchroneous introductory Zoom meeting.

This course aims at developing participants’ skills necessary for effective reading by providing information on reading strategies and, more importantly, summary writing. It familiarizes doctoral students with the rules of writing outlines and summaries. Providing the participants with opportunities to practice analysing academic texts, it develops their paraphrasing skills and gives them the guidelines to write coherent and concise summaries. The course will cover 28 hours of asynchronous online activities and a 2-hour introductory online meeting.

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.

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

The final grade will be based on:

Completing online tests (Module Assignments): 75%

Regular systematic work on the platform: 20%

Attending the introductory meeting: 5%