English for Academic and Professional Success!

Fall 2014


At the American Language Institute (ALI), you can get the language skills you need to be successful at
USC. Improve your English. Speak more fluently. Write more easily and accurately. Complete your
assignments faster. Get better grades.

The following elective courses are open to all international students.

ALI 144: High Intermediate Oral Skills (1 unit)
ALI 144 is a workshop designed to help students succeed in an American university or in a
professional career. Students will work on tasks with may include greetings and small talk,
interviews, oral summaries, descriptions of tables and graphs, short presentations, story
telling, or making introductions. The class will also focus on pronunciation, fluent speech, and
grammatical accuracy. The workshop format will allow students to maximize the classroom
experience by practicing a task or language focus and getting immediate feedback from peers
and the instructor in class.

ALI 145: High Intermediate Writing Skills (1 unit)
ALI 145 is designed to provide an overview of academic writing skills needed to succeed in an American
university and prepare students for an academic or professional career. The course consists of modules
focusing on specific writing skills (summarizing/paraphrasing, data commentaries, proposal writing). The
course will introduce students to technical communication and persuasive strategies for addressing a variety of
audiences. It will also cover basic professional writing techniques from writing resumes to cover letters.

ALI 254: Advance Oral Skillsunits (2 units)
This class is for highintermediate and advanced level students who want to communicate
more fluently, effectively, and confidently in spoken English. This class provides students
with opportunities to work on the oral skills needed for everyday conversations as well as
class discussions and short oral presentations.

ALI 255 Advance Writing Workshop (2 units)
Here's a good opportunity for advanced level students to write clearer, more effective English for collegelevel
purposes. In this class students receive extensive feedback on multiple drafts of academic research papers with
a focus on revising and editing while focusing on resilience with vocabulary and grammatical structure.

ALI 275 Writing for Academic Publication and Dissertations (2 units)
This elective course is designed to help international students who are doing advanced
writing, including theses and dissertations, or papers for publication in English. The
course will cover conventions of advanced academic writing, and will address problems
in syntax and vocabulary more common to written than to spoken English. Students
will work within the guidelines of the style manuals of their respective fields, on their
own projects, and instruction will individualized.



For more information, email askali@usc.edu or
visit our website at http://dornsife.usc.edu/ali.