Composition 2 is a second-year required course and is the continuation of Composition 1, building on the English-language skills developed in Composition 1. This course focuses primarily on writing multi-paragraph essays. The course continues to stress accuracy in writing and emphasizes skills and strategies to improve the ability to communicate in written English. Students will also learn how to analyze and strengthen their written English and that of their classmates. The general goal of the course is to increase the academic English language proficiency of the students to a high-intermediate level in writing. This course is taught together with Oral Training 2.

In Composition II, you will learn to: 1. To organize essays in a logical order (time, spatial, emphatic order) and with proper transitions 2. To write a narrative essay that is developed inductively or deductively 3. To write well-organized descriptive paragraphs about a person or a place 4. To write a well-organized expository essay that has a clear thesis and supporting details 5. To write a well-organized summary-response essay on a selected article (to summarize, paraphrase, and quote) In Oral Training II, you will learn to: 1. To control volume, pausing, and rate of speaking, and to improve eye contact, vitality, and posture 2. To tell a short story clearly and fluently 3. To conduct an interview using techniques such as preparing questions, getting more information, giving encouragement, asking for repetition and clarification, restating, and interrupting 4. To paraphrase and summarize the ideas of others in a group discussion 5. To give a summary-response speech

Wyrick, Jean. Steps to Writing Well. 11th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011.
Grant, Margaret, and Patricia Porter. Communicating Effectively in English: Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers. 2nd Ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers, 1992.


Each course should be a real intellectual journey. The following course principles and procedures are designed to help us achieve this goal.
• Mobile phones and similar electronic gadgets must be switched off throughout the whole class.
• Tunghai University requires that students who miss one third of classes be excluded from the final exam and given a failing grade. Arriving 15 or more minutes late for class will be counted as an absence. As noted above, if you miss more than three sessions, your total participation grade will be zero.
• Late writing assignments will NOT be accepted. If there is a problem with meeting deadlines, you should contact the teacher beforehand. Writing assignments must be handed both in the form of hardcopies and via email.
• The penalty for plagiarism (“Simply put, plagiarism is using another person’s words or ideas without appropriate acknowledge”; The MLA Style Manual) is a grade of 0 for the assignment and, depending on the seriousness of the offense, you may be referred to the Department Chair for further penalties. Some advice: don’t copy from encyclopedias, books, or other reference materials which you find in our library or on the Internet (eg. Wikipedia, Spark Notes, etc.) The instructor knows that these resources exist and that life is full of temptations!