Course contents:
Meaning of communication skills; objectives and relevance in university studies
Listening skills: factors contributing to active listening, developing active listening, listening to lectures and note taking. Reading skills: Characteristics of academic texts i.e. topic sentence and support paragraphs; the SQ3R reading strategy that is the Survey, the Question, and the Read, the Recall, and the Review; and Critical reading. Speaking skills: making oral presentations (i.e. speaking versus reading), uses of signals to perform various communicative acts in presenting, handling presentation materials including audio-visual aids. Writing skills: characteristics of effective academic writing, interpreting essay topics, planning essays and other texts; writing: organizing information, thought and developing of ideas: sentence/paragraph structure reduction paragraphing and sectioning, text types and development, essay writing; report writing: experiments, project, research, term papers; summary writing-abstracts, summary and executive summary. Academic literacy skills: literature review techniques, literature evaluation, making citations from literature, presenting a list of references.
Learning outcomes
Students should be able to: