Course Description
This course is designed for students who wish to upgrade their listening skills for educational and/or employment purposes. This course is most appropriate for people who are intending to take college or university courses. Through listening to materials from a variety of sources on many subjects, students will improve their ability to understand and respond appropriately in increasingly complex or problematic situations. Students will also improve their listening skills for academic study by following formal discussions, taking good notes, and organizing and using these notes to complete simple academic assignments. Through these activities, students will also continue to develop language skills.
Course Content
Listening
To follow conversations, discussions, reports and lectures
- Use pre-listening techniques to prepare for a listening task
- Identify purpose and/or issue, overall key idea, main ideas, and key details
- Use active listening strategies
- Use discourse and conversational markers to follow the organization of a discussion or talk
- Refer to pre-listening and reference materials, and use context clues (e.g., synonyms) to determine meanings of unfamiliar words and phrases
- Take notes
- Use notes to complete assignments
- Use notes to prepare for quizzes
- Recognize the difference between supported and unsupported documents
- Identify underlying issues and problems
- Recognize cultural differences and show awareness of the general features of own culture and associated world views
To listen for discrete items
- Write from dictation
- Transcribe speech
- Reconstruct text from dictocomps (retelling a story)
- Listen for how information is organized (e.g., process, reasons, comparison/contrast)
- Listen for specific pronunciation elements (e.g., special intonation questions, vowel and consonant sounds, stressed and unstressed words, linking and final consonants)
Speaking
To participate in conversations and discussions
As participant:
- listen and actively contribute
- use appropriate functions and conversational signals
Reading and Writing
To prepare for, support, and extend listening
- Write notes and outlines. Other written tasks could include interview questions and answers, reports, summaries and/or paragraphs.
- Organize notes identifying overall key idea, main ideas, and key details
- Use readings for listening tasks
Accuracy
- To identify and work on as need arises:
- all accuracy items from 100 and 200 levels
- perfect tenses: past perfect, future perfect, all conditionals
- verbals: infinitives, gerunds, base forms
- word forms: nouns, adjectives, adverbs
- articles
Classroom skills
- To take responsibility for the following:
- Attendance and punctuality
- Class work and assignments
- Participation and teamwork
- Communication and completion of simple information management tasks using appropriate technology (Internet, course website, etc.)
Learning Activities
The instructor will facilitate, observe and evaluate students’ participation in communicative activities. Whole and small group instruction will be combined with individual assistance and student-directed learning. Students will participate in the setting of goals by identifying their communicative and language development needs, and will participate in the selection of learning activities.
Learning Outcomes
Overall Objectives
Extend communicative competence and language accuracy for a range of educational and/or employment purposes
Specific Objectives
- Understand general interest and academic oral communication on sometimes unfamiliar topics to obtain detailed information, to explore academic content, and to develop critical thinking
- Take notes for a range of academic purposes
- Use strategies to learn academic material
- Speak to extend listening skills
- Read to prepare for, support, and extend listening skills, and expand vocabulary
- Write with a specified level of accuracy to extend listening skills
- Monitor and apply strategies to a specified level of accuracy in grammar, sentence structure, word choice and intonation/stress/pronunciation
- Assess progress
- Participate effectively in a college classroom
Textbook Materials
Students may be required to purchase a textbook and/or audio materials.