Introduction to academic reading, writing, and vocabulary. Students are exposed to reading texts of various genres, such as encyclopedias, magazines, newspapers, and websites, and are taught strategies for dealing with them. The writing component teaches argumentation and such rhetorical modes as definition, description, exemplification, causal analysis, and comparison. Students are taught the writing process and introduced to paragraphing, cohesion, conciseness, unity and the use of specific detail, and are alerted to common errors in grammar and sentence structure. The vocabulary component is based on the Academic Word List, a corpus of vocabulary items based on the most frequently occurring lexis in a broad range of academic texts. During the course, students are expected to give short oral presentations on a variety of topics.