Übung Sprachpraxis Englisch 2 3 Critical Reasoning

This is an introductory course in thinking and reasoning skills. The course will be offered in the form of worksheets which are designed to help you improve your thinking and reasoning skills. The course is strongly practice orientated. The worksheets contain mainly exercises and this means that in class you spend most of your time doing things rather than listening to your instructor. Extensive use will be made of short video clips to put argumentative points across. The course will consist of the following: A. An introduction to some aspects of the art of argumentation. 1. Analyzing parts of argument: a. simple analysis of argument, and b. stating arguments in argument form. 2. Constructing simple arguments, focusing on: a. reasons (what counts as a good and a bad reason?) b. explanations (understanding explanation as reasons, finding alternative explanations) c. simple inferences (distinguishing between deductive and inductive arguments) d. patterns of reasoning (side-by side reasoning, chain reasoning, joint reasoning) e. simple strategies to strengthen and weaken argument. B. Application to short texts: we focus on a. summarizing argument and extracting the thesis of a text b. identifying reasons in support of an argument c. identifying (unstated and other) assumptions d. identifying explanations and devising alternative explanations e. drawing conclusions and recognizing implications. C. Evaluating longer texts: we focus on a. reconstruction of the central idea and the supporting argument of a text b. various strategies to generate supporting and/or counterargument, which involve - drawing inferences (what can be inferred from the text?), - spelling out consequences (what consequences follow from the main argument), - identifying principles (which principles are contained in the text?), and - drawing on general knowledge (what do I know about the issue at hand?) - challenging reasons and explanations, and offering alternatives. D. Introduction to propositional logic. In this part of the course we learn how to evaluate the acceptability (i.e. validity) of arguments. Please note that this is an introductory course to informal text analysis; no previous knowledge is required. BA students please note that it is possible to do both the written and oral Teilmodulprüfung in this course. I hope you will enjoy the course! FB 02 Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik Successful completion of Modul 1, or, successful completion of Modul 4 or 5. Uni Kassel WiSe 2015/16 Anglistik/Englisch Zweitfach Coetzee Pieter Hendrik