Aims

To acquire advanced skills in reading and writing. At the end of the course, the student will be able to:
- accurately understand texts of an advanced level, even technical or literary texts;
- identify and explain the technical and rhetorical means used by the writers (at the lexical, grammatical, phraseological, stylistic and pragmatic level);
- give a coherently organized written summary of fact and arguments found in different written sources;
produce clear and structured written documents of a relatively formal character (official letters, essays, literary analyses, etc.). Particular attention will be given to developing arguments and to critical personal reasoning.

Main themes

1. Starting from authentic and varied texts, the course is an initiation to reading techniques (extensive and intensive reading, skimming, scanning, etc.)
2. Writing based on texts: contraction, translation, commentary, analysis, etc.This course intends to improve the reading and writing skills of first year students. The material consists only of "authentic" texts, chosen on the basis of functional, motivational, and cultural criteria in the broad sense. Newspaper articles are (partly) translated. Literary texts (short stories, "Korte verhalen") are analysed. Both categories may be the base material for written work.

Content and teaching methods

15 hours of lectures: detailed lexical, grammatical, syntaxic, phraseologic, stylistic and pragmatic particularities of formal texts; methods of academic argumentation.
15 tutorial hours to put the different theoretical approaches into practice and integrate the different aspects of the course.
20 hours of study and individual work, in particular:
- personal and systematic study of the vocabulary contained in the documents considered;
- preliminary preparation of the texts;
- redaction of documents;
- complementary exercises of correction in self-learning
- updating of personal notes, revision, memorization.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Evaluation : Written exam in June.





Course Holder/Course Supervision :
Supervision by a professor of the GERM Department; tutorial by an assistant who takes part in the evaluation.

Other credits in programs