Grades 9-12 Advanced

Students entering this class typically:

• have a functional level of active vocabulary,
• need only occasional help in understanding class work in mainstream classes,
• can follow the “teacher talk” of most mainstream classes,
• possess intermediate competence in English verb tenses,
• can contribute to conversations using short phrases, and
• can write sentences with some complex sentence structure.

The course develops ESL students':

• speaking skills beyond conversation, developing ability to relate stories, summarize texts, and express opinions,
• reading and research skills, especially reading for information, reducing dependence on the dictionary, and
• writing in terms of grammatical accuracy, ease of expression, and complexity.

Course content

• a focus on writing in an organized way, paragraph construction,
• specific attention to grammatical structures needed to improve accuracy and fluency in writing,
• library and internet use to train note-taking skills, preparing written and oral reports of historical events and famous people, and
• written and oral summaries of challenging reading.

Students leaving course should be able to:

• express themselves orally in longer sentences, communicating most of what they want to say,
• contribute a bit to what is said in mainstream classes,
• exhibit general independence in completing assignments for mainstream classes,
• read texts for mainstream classes and comprehend the essential points, being able to write complete answers to questions, though sometimes perhaps still with inaccuracies, and
• write complete sentences with accurate use of simple tenses, with clear competence in complex sentence structure, dependent clauses, time expressions, gerunds, etc.