English 101/101e

Student Course Description

Freshman English 101 and 102 are required of all students at UMass Boston with the exception of those in CPCS. English 101 should be taken in the first semester of your freshman year. If you are a new freshman entering without prior college credit, you will find your 101 course linked with a First Year Seminar, making friendships easier to form among a small group of new students taking the same two classes for an entire semester.

If English is not your first language, you may be placed into ESL courses, 101E and 102E. These courses, designed for non-native speakers of English, parallel 101 and 102 and meet the same graduation requirements. The following description therefore applies to both 101 and 101E.

English 101 is an introductory course in critical reading and writing to prepare you for working with the complex texts and ideas you will find in your college studies. English 101 teaches you to discover and shape your own perspectives in dialogue with challenging readings through a drafting and re-drafting process. The course is structured by interesting, thought-provoking assignment sequences, giving you opportunities for the kind of sustained academic inquiry that includes talking back to texts and re-thinking your ideas. Central to this process of inquiry is revision, which we teach as the means by which writers reach higher levels of understanding and clarity. With an emphasis on both the rewriting of individual papers and the consolidation of informal responses into formal essays, we are able to dispel much of the anxiety that may accompany learning to write, and to create supportive environments for you to make progress. Our courses are designed, in short, to make success possible for committed students.  

Standard Policies

While each instructor articulates specific requirements in a course syllabus, all courses in the Freshman English program adhere to the following general guidelines:

• Students will do substantial daily homework, including weekly writing of extended prose, toward the shaping of formal, revised papers. Students write 3-5 formal papers, depending on the number of working papers and readings that precede them and revisions that follow.
  
  
• Students must meet due dates and keep up with the work as planned; late paper policies make it impossible for anyone to hand in a term’s work all at once. Students who fall substantially behind in their work should not expect to pass the course.
  
  
• Attendance is required. Students with more than 4 absences in Tuesday-Thursday or Monday-Wednesday classes should not expect to pass the course. Students with more than 6 absences in Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes should not expect to pass the course. Students with more than 2 absences in classes that meet once a week should not expect to pass the course.
  
  
• Students are expected to come to class with all necessary materials for participating actively. Cell phones should be off and headphones put away.
  
  
• Students must abide by the University’s code on plagiarism and academic honesty. (See UMB Catalogue, pp. 332-35.)
  

Satisfactory Completion of 101

To receive a C- or better, you must fulfill your specific instructor’s course requirements, including attendance, paper completion and class participation. Over and above these basics, you need to have course materials that demonstrate the following outcomes:

1. Through your notes, drafts, classwork, and completed essays, you demonstrate an understanding that college reading and writing involves rereading and rewriting.
   
   
2. You are able to form generalizations about readings in writing and to test your generalizations specifically and coherently.
   
   
3. You are able to summarize the position that an author is taking and to draw accurately from a text toward the development of your own position.
   
   
4. You can analyze the relationships between two or more texts.
   
   
5. You demonstrate sensitivity to a reader’s expectations for sequentially developed ideas in paragraphs.
   
   
6. You demonstrate a growing awareness of the choices writers need to make in different contexts about using or not using personal experience to develop arguments.
   
   
7. You demonstrate an understanding of how to use quotation and in-text citation to support your analyses and to develop dialogues with reading.
   
   
8. You are learning to use reading and writing to engage in a process of academic inquiry.
   
   
9. You make progress in finding and correcting your sentence-level errors, including fragments, comma splices, run-ons, and spelling, tense and agreement errors.