English Foundation Program

In the Foundation Program you make the critical transition from studying English as a language to studying for your degree in English. The credits you receive in this full-time semester-long program count towards university requirements for graduation. You experience the most distinctive part of an American liberal arts education: studying several types of subjects with professors who are specialists in their fields.

Foundation semester

In the first semester you will take four courses.

You will have the choice of a FirstBridge course, which consists of two linked courses specially chosen for you from a wide variety of subject areas. This interdisciplinary learning experience will encourage you to approach the same questions in different ways, all while improving and practicing the language-based skills required for success in an American university.

Some FirstBridge courses available to EnglishBridge students are:

FirstBridge 3: HUMAN THINKING/MACHINE THINKING

This course explores the ever more porous boundaries between computers and people. In an age where technology shows growingly human characteristics, and human behavior and thought are increasingly manipulated using machines, this FirstBridge course provides students with practical and critical skills to navigate the latest developments in the man-machine matrix. Tomer Libal’s classes will provide an introduction to key concepts in computational thought as well as establish students’ basic coding skills. Russell Williams’ classes will consider how forms of writing, including essays, poems, novels, Tweets and Facebook posts strive to articulate what is uniquely human. In the reflective seminar, students and professors will collaborate on a digital project, which seeks to practically interrogate the relationship between computing and literature and consider different attempts to digitalize different aspects of human thinking. Students will discuss, too, how contemporary thinkers and popular culture (including the TV series Black Mirror) articulate some of the pressing issues raised by the course. This FirstBridge course will, from computational and literary standpoints, stage a series of encounters between key concepts, such as ‘stories’, ‘structures’, ‘logic’, ‘thinking’, ‘creativity’, ‘knowledge’, ‘influence’, and ‘experimentation’.

EnglishBridge

EnglishBridge features exactly the same type of courses that all other new freshman take in their first semester at AUP. What makes EnglishBridge distinctive is that you will have more time with your professors to work through course material and to understand what you have to do to succeed in an American university environment.

In your first semester you will also take these two classes:

After the Foundation Semester

In your second semester you take EN 0950 in combination with AUP courses that you will select with the help of your academic advisor. These can be courses that count for the major that you have in mind, other courses required for graduation, or simply courses in areas that attract your intellectual curiosity.

Other classes to be chosen with the help of the student's advisor.

After semester two

Since good, solid writing is so important to university study, AUP continues to provide support for developing this skill. All students at AUP, whatever their native languages, take writing courses, of which up to twenty credits altogether may be applied toward their degree.

To complete the English sequence for the general education requirement Speaking the World, you will take the following writing courses over the next three semesters. This sequence allows students to move into the level best adapted to their needs. You must continue taking English, passing each course with a minimum grade of “C,” until you have completed all levels.