This course addresses skills and strategies international graduate students need to carry out teaching responsibilities and provides practice for effective intercultural communication. These skills transfer to other settings. Students successfully complete the course by demonstrating their ability to convey content information from their field to either undergraduate students or to other audiences in a comprehensible and appropriate manner.

International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) receive assistance in improving spoken English proficiency and/or teaching skills, as individual needs require. A noncredit course, does not meet as a regular class; Student Teaching Consultants work individually with the ITAs.

An advanced course for researchers, fellows,and visiting faculty at the University.Participants hone writing skills through analyzing models, writing up research and creating professional correspondence. Topics include effective argumentation, academic style, coherence, conciseness, and clarity,, strategic use of sentence structure, and vocabulary. Students receive feedback on writing assignments. One-on-one format, 2 hrs/wk. Program fee applies.Prerequisite: Instructor Permission

Students who have a good command of English syntax and vocabulary, but who are being held back by pronunciation problems will be referred to this course. Enrollment is generally limited to prospective international teaching assistants. Other students may enroll as space allows.

An introduction to the study of literature that focuses on the intersections between imaginative literature and other fields of human endeavor. Why is imaginative literature worth reading and taking seriously? How can becoming a better reader enhance other aspects of our careers and our lives?

An interdisciplinary survey of global time-travel novels, film and music (Kindred, The Time Machine, Interstellar, Back to the Future, Janelle Monáe, Bob Marley). Armed with genre vocabulary and physics concepts (special relativity, time dilation, retrocausality), we will untangle science fiction from science fact and unpack the thorny ethical, narrative and physics implications of time travel. Assignments include time machine design, time policy proposals and a capstone Time Travel Convention.

Argumentation Across Disciplines examines how the linguistic and rhetorical features of argument vary from discipline to discipline. The course will make two primary movements: The first is an examination of what argument is through the lens of classical and new rhetorical theory. Second, students will do comparative research on the linguistic and rhetorical features of texts in two different disciplines.

Iconic American sites such as Monticello, Walden Pond, and our network of national parks have inspired generations of Americans. But displacement is just as much a part of our national identity. In this class we will analyze fiction, journalism, film, paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture that document the stories of Indigenous dispossession, housing discrimination, Japanese internment, redlining, gentrification, and homelessness. 

This class examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S., tracing the paths of migrating groups and their impact on urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. We'll dig for cultural clues to changing attitudes about migration over time. Photographs, videos, books, movies, government records, poems, podcasts, paintings, comic strips, museums, manifestos: you name it, we'll analyze it for this class.

Limited enrollment. Topics vary from year to year. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.