General English is a 3-credit mandatory course which is offered in the list of general courses of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran for BSc programs. All undergraduate students in Iran must pass this course in order to graduate. This course is developed for BSc science and engineering students at Sharif University of Technology, International Campus on Kish Island who intend to improve their general English knowledge and as a pre-requisite to their Oral Communication and Technical Writing courses offered afterwards. The classes meet three hours per week.
Course Objectives
The main purpose of this course is to boost up the students’ language proficiency with regard to reading skill and vocabulary. However, due attention is given to speaking, listening and writing as well. In short, the students are expected to:

• acquire a good knowledge of vocabulary through word roots, prefixes and suffixes in order to better enrich their lexical repertoire.
• improve their knowledge of grammar contained in reading passages through implicit or explicit communicative instructions.
• expand their reading strategies introduced in each chapter of the book. These skills include skimming, scanning, inferencing, previewing, identifying meaning from context, etc.
• improve their speaking competence through related discussions on the passage and in the pre-reading/post-reading activities and also giving lectures.
• improve their listening skills through the related audio-visual tasks and exercises assigned in class.