ESL 07 Resources

ESL 07: Basic Reading and Writing for Students Learning English as a Second Language

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.

By the end of ESL 07 students should:

  • Read and write with greater fluency than when they began the course.
  • Provide a main idea for their essays.
  • Respond to the texts of other authors in their essays.
  • Describe their own experiences and observations in their writing.
  • Demonstrate the ability to organize their writing.
  • Summarize and paraphrase what they have read.
  • Understand the need to analyze ideas, whether from personal experience or from texts.
  • Understand that reading involves continuous guesswork, prediction, and reconsideration.
  • Understand writing as a process that involves drafting and reflection.
  • Identify important points, passages, and quotations from their reading.
  • Improve basic language competence, including grammatical knowledge and the use of strategies to figure out the meaning of words from context.

Extended Course Description
Sample Course 1
Sample Course 2
Portfolio Information for Students Handout
Final Portfolio Response Form