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  • Page ID
    20741
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    Overview

    This course is designed to help meet the needs of all students in first-semester writing courses in California Community Colleges with an eye toward equitable resource availability in terms of price and quality. This is an introductory course that offers instruction in expository and argumentative writing, appropriate and effective use of language, close reading, cogent thinking, research strategies, information literacy, and documentation. With the passage of AB 705, students are directly placed into first-year college English courses to maximize the probability that they will successfully complete transfer-level English courses within a year. Students who would have ordinarily placed into Basic Skills courses a few years ago are now expected to keep up with college-ready students. The student population a first-year English course now serves is highly academically diverse, and the students have varying levels of need. Therefore, this course outline includes a plan for students who are fully college-ready with augmentation for those who need additional scaffolding and support in various areas, including language, organization, and student skills.

    This chapter is a general guide for instructors who would like to use this book as a template for their first year composition course. The chapter provides a general course plan, types of essays, and general unit plans for what to assign for each "unit." These unit assignments are then cross-referenced with the text further to provide instructors guidance on what materials in the course may be especially useful for developmental or ELL students (or some combination thereof), and -- conversely -- what may not be needed for the traditional first-year composition student.

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