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ESL 07 - BASIC READING AND WRITING FOR STUDENTS LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
(0 crs. 10 hrs. - 10 equated crs.)

This is the first course in an ESL sequence designed for students whose first language is not English and whose results on the CUNY entrance exams indicate that they need extensive work on developing these areas. Activities include intensive work on reading, writing and revision, with an emphasis on developing fluency in writing and basic reading comprehension.

The goal for students in ESL 07 is to build fluency in both reading and writing. Fluency refers to the ability to understand reading assignments and to write comprehensible essays. Because the primary focus of ESL 07 is the development of fluent expression and comprehension, skill building will be encouraged primarily through reading and writing with some support from more form focused activities. These reading and writing activities ask students to focus on the construction of meaning as they build fluency.

Students in this course produce writing in a variety of genres such as freewriting, informal reading journals, personal narratives, and reading-based essays. Writing will be developed by introducing students to revision. By the end of the course, students must demonstrate a basic understanding of essay organization and coherence. Students also read in a variety of genres including books (novels and non-fiction), short stories, essays, and articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals. Because the course emphasizes the connections between reading and writing, students often use writing to respond to their reading in the form of focused freewriting, summaries, paraphrases, and responses to questions related to general comprehension, main ideas and supporting details, inference, and so on.