Advanced Grammar is a 3-credit course designed to develop students’ advanced understanding and practical use of English grammar, with a particular focus on academic and professional writing. Rather than viewing grammar simply as a set of rules, the course approaches grammar as a system of meaningful choices that enables writers to communicate ideas accurately, clearly, appropriately, and persuasively.

Throughout the course, students progress from sentence-level grammar to discourse-level writing, exploring key areas including clause combination; embedded, noun, and complement clauses; verb forms; noun phrases; hedging, boosting, and positioning; collocation and corpus searching; and grammatical choices beyond the sentence. Particular attention is given to how these grammatical resources function in authentic academic texts and different communicative contexts.

The course adopts an interactive and application-oriented approach. Through guided analysis, in-class exercises, academic text editing, discussions, corpus-based exploration, collaborative case studies, and group projects, students learn not only to identify grammatical structures but also to explain, evaluate, and apply grammatical choices in their own writing.

By the end of the course, students are expected to demonstrate greater grammatical accuracy and sophistication, make more informed language choices, organize ideas more effectively across sentences and paragraphs, and apply appropriate grammatical strategies to different academic genres. Ultimately, the course aims to help students become more confident, independent, and effective academic and professional communicators.

Course philosophy:
More Choices. Clearer Meaning. Stronger Writing.