The main goal of these courses is for students to develop the listening and speaking skills that will be required of them in an international degree program. In PC1 and PC2, students learn through interacting with theme-based recorded material that is divided into social, broadcast, and academic English tasks. They take part in an assessed speaking activity at the end of each quarter and are exposed to a wide variety of topics in a wide range of accents. The students’ progress is determined through continuous assessment and final examinations.

These courses are designed to improve students’ academic writing skills on a pre-intermediate level. Students learn how to write through the “process approach”. This means they write their paragraphs and essays in multiple drafts, which they edit and improve after submitting their work to their peers and teachers for editing. Grammatical accuracy is a particularly important objective at the lower levels of PC.

The objective of these courses is to develop the students’ ability to understand the main ideas and supporting information in level-appropriate reading texts. To facilitate this process, students are given a wide range of practice, which aims to improve comprehension by encouraging students to summarize and critically reflect on outline notes they have taken. Furthermore, because students will not be able to cope with university-level readings unless they have an appropriate level of vocabulary, all PC students are required to demonstrate knowledge of the Academic Word List (AWL) sublists 1-4 by the end of PC2.

When students enter MUIC, they are expected to be able to understand and discuss what they have heard in lectures and read in books, newspapers and other sources. Furthermore, they are expected to be able to write and speak coherently and logically. Accordingly, the purpose of the Integrated Skills courses is to help students make connections between the receptive skills of reading and listening and the productive skills of writing and speaking. In these courses, students take notes on lectures and readings, using the Cornell University method of note-taking; then they use these notes to demonstrate their understanding of what they have heard and read. Students are also expected to show a competent use of basic logic, APA referencing and plagiarism avoidance strategies. The courses are thematically organized and are strongly integrated with the Writing Enrichment courses.

Well-regarded universities require their students to demonstrate understanding of and engagement with source material in the form of essays and term papers. They also expect their students to be able to summarize accurately and use citations and reference lists. Accordingly, in these courses, students are required to write essays based on texts they have read and are expected to produce writings at a high academic standard. Students need to successfully produce timed essays and a term paper in order to graduate from PC.

Academic Reading is designed to improve the academic reading and research skills of intermediate- to upper-intermediate level non-native speakers of English. The focus is on reading comprehension and the development of research skills. This course is student centered and is aimed at enhancing students’ learning autonomy and independence. The major assessment in this course is an extended research-based Term Paper Project.

This course serves as a reintroduction for students with a non-mathematics background and students who need to revive their mathematics skills. It helps students learn about various topics in algebra, such as basic arithmetic operations, simplification of algebraic expressions, factoring algebraic expressions, solving simple linear and quadratic equations, solving simple linear inequalities, analyzing and solving simple word problems, understanding of relations and functions.

This course serves as a reinforcement for students with some basic mathematical background and students who need to advance their mathematics skills. It helps students learn further topics in pre-calculus such as analyzing relations and functions, linear functions and its application, linear inequalities and its applications, sketching graphs, solving system of linear equations, applications of linear equations, applications of quadratic equations, radical expressions and rational expressions, statistics and data interpretation, solving word problems.