This course is designed to enhance mainly your reading proficiency through an extensive exposure to a diverse range of quality writings in English. We shall be reading from a selection of literature and the media writings. In terms of literature, we shall be studying short stories, poems, essays and dramas. As for the media, we shall be focusing on both the print and cyber media, including mainstream press such as Time, New York Times, and alternative, critical media such as Z-net and The Nation. To facilitate your listening capacity, the course will be conducted in both English and Mandarin, depending on your classroom response. To help you to express yourself in English, I shall encourage you to speak up in class, and participate in our forums and debates in English.
There will be a mid-term (30%), a final (40%) and various off-the-cuff quizzes and on-the-spot assignments (10%) in class. A group project (20%) would involve either a drama presentation (acting or reading) or a collaborative academic review (on an approved subject of your choice). Required course material will be a reader (or handouts in class) and a play which can be purchased in the bookstore.
The course material, syllabus, and grade quotient are all subject
to change pending on further notice.

Course material
Short stories by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Malamud, Carver, Oates, Gish Jen. (handouts or on reserve)

Poems by Shakepeare, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Yeats, Thomas,
Housman, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Plath, Ginsberg, Hughes, Aneglou, Merwin, Strand. (all handouts)

Essays by Montaigne (translation), Emerson, Woolf, Rachel Carson,
C. P. Snow, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Jay Gould, Wang Hao.
(handouts or on reserve)

Plays: Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (for law school students), or Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Physicists (for science, EE, medical and agriculture students).

Some of the assigned readings will be available in the reserve area at the main library
Reports and reviews from Time, N