Listening and Speaking

Description

This course is designed to develop students’ English listening and speaking competences. It incorporates level-appropriate listening and speaking materials, strategies and practice to aid in students' comprehension and oral communication. Students will develop their listening skills through the use of authentic listening tasks in a wide range of academic situations. They will listen actively to talks in order to synthesize information received from specific listening tasks and discussions. They will also identify and develop their note-taking abilities and enlarge their vocabulary repertoire. Students will improve their speaking ability in terms of fluency, accuracy and comprehensibility so as to give an effective presentation and receive feedback on their performance.

Program

Humanities

Objectives

• On completion of this course, students will be able to:
  1.1 identify meaning of unfamiliar words by using the context
  1.2 understand the organizational structure of a talk
  1.3 follow an argument or the sequence of events in a story, by focusing on common logical connectors (e.g. however, because) and temporal connectors
  1.4 assign literal and intended meanings to text(s)
  1.5 interact with an interlocutor(s), showing interest and asking pertinent questions, clarifications, etc.
  2.1 use context to build listening expectations
  2.2 recognize the topic, speaker, cohesive devices, utterances’ communicative functions according to situations, participants and goals
  2.3 identify main intent, main idea and word cues
  2.4 identify situations, relationships between participants and speaker’s purpose
  2.5 apply interaction rules: negotiation (to give feedback, to ask for clarification, to maintain a topic), clarification, attending signals, turn taking and topic nomination, maintenance and termination
  3.1 use effective presentation skills
  3.2 listen and respond to reduced forms (phonological, morphological and pragmatic) and fragments
  3.3 listen for meaning in the midst of distracting performance variables (hesitations, false starts, pauses, corrections and ungrammatical forms) in everyday casual speech
  3.4 process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections and other performance variables at different rates of delivery
  4.1 identify the component parts of a conversation, i.e. beginning, body, and ending
  4.2 apply note-taking skills
  4.3 develop a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension or lack thereof
  4.4 develop a battery of speaking strategies (topic control and/or shifting, repair, turn-taking, pause fillers use, rephrasing, key-words emphasis, non-verbal cues use, intonation patterns for pragmatic effect, etc.)
  4.5 use the time and extra information available in spoken language (such as redundancy, rephrasing, repetitions, elaboration and insertions) to process meaning