OGU welcomes students from all backgrounds, and as such, the Faculty of International Studies is comprised of students from around the world who begin study with a wide range of English proficiency levels. This means that an English course that would go beyond basic meaning making and appropriately challenge even native-level learners was a necessary fit in our curriculum.
This Top Tier English course explores English language through the lens of genre, beginning with professional emails and moving through to procedural texts, personal recounts, essays, and more. In the course, students learn to approach any text––a book, a website, a receipt, an email, a YouTube video, etc.––with a critical eye, examining both the types of multimodal features and language native to that text type as well as thinking about the audience and author and the purpose that the text has. After this, the students move on to creating their own texts within a given genre.
Thus far, students have read and created their own professional request emails as well as procedural texts that teach the reader how to do something that the students are already familiar with such as how to cook something simple.