ENGH 100 One Page Curriculum Description

Overview and Main Concepts

ENGH 100 is four-credit equivalent to ENGH 101. This course provides student writers with the skills and mindsets needed to effectively respond to a range of academic and public writing situations with a special focus on the role of language in written communication. Multilingual students—students who are fluent in English and/or students for whom English is an additional language—develop rhetorical reading and writing strategies that attend to the linguistic features and moves enacted in a range of non-fiction genres. Students learn to: engage in a process of discovery and consider diverse perspectives before making a judgment, taking a stance, or proposing a solution; locate, evaluate, and synthesize source material to discover and answer complex questions; and reflect on their linguistic choices, and research and writing processes. The additional credit hour in this course allows instructors to spend more time on instructional content, devote more attention to language noticing activities, and give students more time for in-class writing practice. 

Major Project Requirements

All ENGH 100 classes include (multiple project requirements may be combined into a single assignment):

  • Three shared texts (at least one academic article) about language/literacy to facilitate reading instruction and vocabulary/lexical development
  • An inquiry-based research assignment that begins with an instructor-reviewed research question
  • An in-depth annotated bibliography
  • Rhetorical adaptation work in which students work on unique rhetorical situations
    • Information from one project is repurposed for a new rhetorical situation (focusing on adapting one’s writing and linguistic choices for changed purposes, audiences, and genres) 
  • Argument writing
  • Public writing (can include multimodal/digital genres)
  • Consistent weekly language noticing activities 

Major Instructional Topics 

  • The rhetorical situation 
  • Analysis of rhetorical situations, including audience and genre analysis with particular attention to conventions of structure and language
  • Critical and rhetorical reading, including rhetorical language noticing    
    • Rhetorical architecture/elements
    • Key concepts and key terms (for lexical development, reading instruction, and research tool) 
  • Metacognition and reflection
  • Inquiry-based research, including research question development and driving questions
  • Information literacy, including source evaluation (with lateral reading strategies such as SIFT), selection, analyses, and synthesis
  • Topic brainstorming, selection, and narrowing/exploratory research strategies
  • Writing process, including feedback, revising and editing strategies
  • Argument/persuasive writing, including responses to audience perspectives and concerns
  • Additional support in language instruction though focused attention on five language patterns, including synthesis, source integration, cohesion, coherence and concision

Mason Writing Intensive Requirements

Because this course is a Writing Intensive course, students will: 

  • Produce at least 3500 words of formal graded prose and engage in informal and reflective assignments, early drafts, and/or task-specific writing assignments (e.g. summaries or reading analyses).
  • Be engaged in the writing and research process and regularly receive feedback and instruction.
  • Revise at least one major project after receiving detailed instructor feedback prior to submitting for a grade.