Nuts and bolts session

Title: How to Meld Critical Analysis, Academic Discourse and Sentence Grammar so that it is at Least Interesting if not Fun

Michael Paton

Abstract
Evidence coming out of tertiary institutions in the United States of America suggests that the compulsory nature of ‘freshman’ English courses, i.e. rhetoric/critical thinking courses, has a negative effect on their acceptability by the student body. This workshop paper considers such a claim in light of five years of qualitative student evaluations of the unit of study, Communication and Critical Analysis, which is a compulsory credit bearing academic communication skills course for the Bachelor of Commerce (Liberal Studies) in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney as well as being at the same time a course used to enhance the communications kills of ‘at risk’ students from non-English speaking backgrounds.