Comp﹧Oral 1 is a required first-year writing and speaking course. The composition component, which introduces students to the writing process and to the conventions of written English, teaches students to write grammatically accurate sentences, well-formed paragraphs with clear topic sentences and supporting details, and coherent short essays. The oral component helps students improve their ability to communicate in accurate, fluent English. Written assignments may include journals, paragraphs, and short essays while oral assignments may include pronunciation exercises, role－play activities, panel discussions, group discussions, impromptu presentations, and planned speeches.

Upon completing this course, students should be able to: (1) Write polished, organized expository essays on familiar topics in an academic way; (2) Begin to recognize and produce writing for basic academic genres: a controlling idea (a topic sentence for a paragraph and a thesis statement for an essay), an organization pattern (such as example, comparison-contrast, and cause-effect), and support that shows unity with the controlling idea and logical order; (3) Use appropriate language suitable for the type of writing they are doing; (4) Understand writing is a creative process that includes prewriting, drafting, and revision. The first semester of the course was focused on paragraph writing with a variety of methods of support. The second semester is focused on the five-paragraph essay (introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion) that can be used for basic academic writing and that can provide a platform from which to develop more advanced kinds of writing. Students will do numerous activities and exercises both in and out of class to help them recognize and execute the rhetorical structures commonly found in English composition. Students will also work on sentence-level and word-level difficulties. In order to pass this class, students must be able to exhibit their ability to execute the course skills.

Refining Composition Skills: Academic Writing and Grammar, 6th edition, by Smalley, Ruetten, and Kozyrev