Literacy Portal

This module covers some of the basic skills which will improve your academic, scientific, and professional writing. ‘Academic Writing Skills’ is ideal for those who are looking to start an undergraduate or postgraduate course, to resume/advance their academic career, or simply to improve the objectivity, accuracy, and clarity of their writing style. Eight individual lessons cover the following topics: how to structure your academic essay; how to argue in an academic essay: evidence, logic, analogy, and other reasoning skills; how to conduct a literature review; how to use citations and references accurately and effectively; things to avoid in academic writing (Part I and II); how to reduce subjective style; how to write successful funding proposals. Hamish Williams (PhD in literary studies) has written 4 books (academic and fiction) and published over 25 academic articles and chapters.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

This course introduces the basics of Middle English language and literature, including grammar, syntax, and pronunciation. Designed for students new to reading Middle English texts in their original form, the course focuses mainly on the English of London and the south of England in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries—the language of Chaucer, Gower, Langland and others.

As a language-learning course as well as a literature course, the first half of each meeting will be devoted to reading Middle English aloud and answering questions about pronunciation and comprehension; the second half will focus on the reading’s content, from basics of plot and conventions of genre to the historical context of each text. Course readings include: a selection of lyric poetry, two short poems by Chaucer, the chivalric romance Sir Orfeo, the Chester play of Noah’s Flood, a chronicle of the reign of King Henry V, Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, and selections from the first English autobiography by a woman, The Book of Margery Kemp.

Is your child struggling to learn how to read? Do they have trouble sounding out words, or understanding the meaning of new words? Do you struggle to explain why "one" begins with an o, and not a w? Then come learn more about the Science of Reading!

This introductory module will show you all about the Science of Reading, and why everyone should understand these fundamental linguistic principles throughout their reading journeys (not just kids!). We will discuss the history of the American Reading Wars and how they have impacted reading instruction, what happens in your brain as you learn to read, and how to use systematic, "building-block" approaches in your own home when reading with your little ones. If you're interested in the "why" and "how" of reading, then this module is for you!

This is the Landing Page for preceptor Will Sherwood's Tolkien and the Romantics series. Using the links on this page, you can explore each member of this series by going to its associated module page for more details.

The Gothic genre has inspired many creative minds to explore the darker realms of human psychology and the wider world, sparking fear, terror, horror and repulsion in its audience. J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth is as much a ruined Gothic wasteland as it is an idyllic utopia. From Shelob's cave and the hypnotic Mirkwood to the Paths of the Dead and the Barrow-Downs, this module will examine Tolkien's use of Dark Romantic and Gothic techniques that were used by writers such as Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and E.T.A. Hoffman to strike terror in the heart of their readers.

The module will follow an 8-lesson structure:

• Lecture 1: The Funk of Forty Thousand Years: A Literary History of the Gothic
• Discussion 1: Chilly Echoes in Tolkien's Middle-earth
• Lecture 2: Bottomless Supernatural: Terror, Horror, Abject
• Discussion 2: Conjuring Creepy Creatures
• Lecture 3: The Weird, the Eerie, and the Dark Side of the Mind
• Discussion 3: Defamiliarising Middle-earth
• Lecture 4: Ruined Landscapes
• Discussion 4: What is left? Can the Gothic recover Middle-earth?

Note: The hybrid 8-lesson structure above is the new format for this module moving forward.

J.R.R. Tolkien famously 'found' his legendarium, translating and editing The Red Book of Westmarch for his twentieth century readers. This is not the first time an author has 'forged' a 'lost' literary history as James Macpherson's 'Ossian' documents from the 1760s started a craze for forgeries. Thomas Chatterton's Rowley and Turgot manuscripts similarly fed off the Ossian controversy while questioning what it really meant to 'forge' a document.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The 1760s, the Age of Forgery
	Discussion 1: Which Red Book are we reading?
Week 2	Lecture 2: The Growth of Romantic Nationalism
	Discussion 2: The Book of Lost Tales: a mythology for which England?
Week 3	Lecture 3: Oral Traditions: Immortality and Youth
	Discussion 3: Vocalising Myth and History
Week 4	Lecture 4: Textual Traditions: Mortal Anxiety and Tangible History
	Discussion 4: Writing myth and history

The imagination and dreams are essential parts of J.R.R. Tolkien's world building which he explored across many stories from 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'On Fairy-stories' to 'The Notion Club Papers'. The same can be said of the Romantics who saw an important connection between the two. In works such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan', Lord Byron's 'The Dream' and 'Darkness', and Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', the imaginary and dream-like meet with awe-inspiring, melancholy or blood-chilling results.

Class Outline:

• Class 1: The Realms of (Childhood) Faery (60m)
• Class 2: Faery’s Enchantment (60m)
• Class 3: The Terror of the Night (60m)
• Class 4: The Past is an Imagined Dreamworld (90m)
• Class 5: Visions of the Apocalypse (60m)
• Class 6: Senses and Sensation (60m)
• Class 7: Glimpses, mere Fragments (90m)

J.R.R. Tolkien's revolutionary depictions of nature have inspired many to respect and cherish the environment. However, if we journeyed back two hundred years, we would discover that radical British Romantic authors were also challenging how readers perceived their surroundings! In this module, we will use ecology to explore the many parallels and contrasts between Tolkien's Arda and the Romantic's portrayals of nature big and small: mountains and meadows, woods and wildernesses, daffodils and dead marshes. This will include examining how characters react to the environment, nature's existence as separate from our own, and the broader concern of the Industrial Revolution's destructive potential.

The module will follow an 8-lesson structure:

• Lecture 1: Visions of Nature
• Discussion 1: What do your Elf-eyes see?
• Lecture 2: All things Sublime and Beautiful
• Discussion 2: Sublime, Beautiful, or both at once?!
• Lecture 3: I want to see mountains!
• Discussion 3: One with our environment
• Lecture 4: Ecology without Humanity
• Discussion 4: What is actually out there beyond the Human sphere?

Note: The hybrid 8-lesson structure above is the new format for this module moving forward.

Boarding schools have become a staple in fantasy, but Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children specializes in children that have stumbled into and then out of portals and haven't quite managed to adjust to being back from their adventures. There are three rules at Eleanor West's: No Solicitations, No Visitors, and No Quests.