In Unit 1, you will learn how sentences become clearer when tenses agree. You'll practice recognizing tense to make your writing more coherent. Unit 2 builds your vocabulary by exploring synonyms and antonyms. In Unit 3, you will develop stronger reading skills when you practice making inferences and explaining your thoughts on what you've read. Unit 4 brings all these topics together as you write a short, cohesive essay about an article. By the end of this course, you will be able to describe your opinions about the things you read. This course is designed to help you use your new skills to communicate your ideas in a clear, thoughtful manner.
First, read the course syllabus. Then, enroll in the course by clicking "Enroll me". Click Unit 1 to read its introduction and learning outcomes. You will then see the learning materials and instructions on how to use them.
How strong is your English vocabulary? Complete this activity to measure your vocabulary size.
Unit 1 introduces you to sentence agreement and tense consistency. Both of these concepts relate to the correct use of verbs to improve clarity of expression. In English, it is important that subjects match their verbs in every sentence. It is also important that the time of verbs, referred to as the verb's tense, stays consistent in a sentence or paragraph. For example, readers would be confused if a sentence mentioned one bird "walked" but later said "birds" or if that same bird "walked" while also "is walking". Clear writing also relies on pronouns correctly referring to their noun antecedents. In this unit, you'll learn how to match subjects with their verbs and pronouns to their nouns and use verb tense consistently in your sentences or paragraphs to help the reader follow along easily. Finally, you'll practice recognizing subject-verb, pronoun-antecedent agreement, and tense consistency errors in order to correct them.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.
We start Unit 1 with a review of three grammatical features. Sometimes, making subjects and their verbs or nouns and their antecedents agree in English can seem difficult, so this review will provide a basic understanding of how this agreement happens. These materials include information about grammar features to keep in mind for subject-verb agreement. After you read the explanations and watch the videos to learn about verbs, you will have a chance to test your understanding by completing practice activities.
Let's start by first reviewing the three grammatical features that affect the correct match between parts of sentences. Next, we will learn about specific subject-verb agreement rules in more detail to understand how to correctly match them in sentences.
Now that we have reviewed grammatical number, person, and case, let's look at subject-verb agreement in more detail to see how they can always be matched in our sentences.
After reviewing subject-verb agreement rules, let's take a look at pronoun-antecedent agreement in more detail to see how they can always be matched in our sentences.
Now that we know how to create agreement in our sentences in English, let's put our knowledge into practice.
These activities give you the opportunity to find out how well you understand how to ensure agreement between subjects and their predicates, as well as pronouns and their antecedents. If you have a difficult time forming and using verbs in the present, you may review and then try these practice activities again.
Now that you know about sentence agreement, let's see if we can easily identify those features in a text.
For this discussion, you will choose a couple of sentences from the Present Tense Discussion in Unit 1 of the ESL002 course and practice identifying any agreement used in that sentence.
In this part of Unit 1, we look at how we use verb tense to maintain sentence agreement. Using a consistent verb tense means using the same tense for verbs in a sentence or paragraph. When writing or editing, be sure to keep using the same tense and not change it unless you have a strong reason to do so. These materials include information about maintaining verb consistency when writing sentences and paragraphs. After you read the explanations and watch the videos to learn about tense consistency, you will have a chance to test your understanding by completing practice activities.
Let's start by first reviewing the role verbs playing sentences. Next, we will look at how maintaining verb tense improves sentence clarity.
After reviewing the role of main, or lexical, verbs in sentences and understanding the importance of tense consistency, let's look at improving sentence clarity by avoiding unnecessary tense shifts in our sentences.
Now that we know how to avoid unnecessary tense shifts when writing, let's put our knowledge into practice.
These activities give you the opportunity to find out how well you can maintain tense consistency in sentences and paragraphs. If you have a difficult time identifying and correcting unnecessary tense shifts, you may review and then try these practice activities again.
Now that we know how to avoid unnecessary tense shifts when writing, let's put our knowledge into practice.
For this discussion, tell a short family story or something that happened to you. As you write and proofread, make sure all your verbs are correct, and the tenses are consistent.
You have learned about important sentence agreement guidelines to write clear sentences in English. This is a lot to take in, for sure! This section will help you review what you learned in Unit 1.
Watch these videos and complete the practice activities to review what you learned about sentence agreement.
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.
Unit 2 reviews reading skills discussed in ESL002, focusing on making inferences and evaluative reading. Distinguishing fact from opinion and using your prior knowledge as you read will help you better comprehend the texts you read. In this unit, you will practice these skills to improve your comprehension of short articles in English.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.
In ESL002, we learned about using a thesaurus to learn synonyms and antonyms. We also learned about the importance of matching the meaning of new words to the context in which they're used. This unit in ESL003 will review some vocabulary strategies that help you best use all the new words you have learned. Be sure to complete the practice activities to learn how to continue to develop these skills.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 2 hours.
This unit pulls together everything you learned in the previous units. In this unit, you will bring together sentence agreement, facts, and word choice to write and share a short expository essay.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 4 hours.
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Take this exam if you want to earn a free Course Completion Certificate.
To receive a free Course Completion Certificate, you will need to earn a grade of 70% or higher on this final exam. Your grade for the exam will be calculated as soon as you complete it. If you do not pass the exam on your first try, you can take it again as many times as you want, with a 7-day waiting period between each attempt.
Once you pass this final exam, you will be awarded a free Course Completion Certificate.