Target audience
For registered participants from across the university and other local HE institutions who need more academic English as a communicative, educational or professional tool and who can take responsibility for their own learning; in particular students, academic staff, administrative ‘knowledge workers’.
Course content and methods
This course provides informal and formal opportunities for you to build or polish your English in communicative activities and academic (or similar) tasks appropriate for university contexts. In particular, it challenges you to improve your academic speaking.
You take charge of your own learning but also cooperate with others in communicating about academic topics and interests. You must be willing to speak English aloud, to contribute actively to class discussions and give oral presentations in university settings. There will be content and language input from the teacher as well as contributions from you.
Transferable skills are often understood to be skills you have developed or are developing at university which will help you in other contexts once you have identified and honed them.
This content-driven, interactive workshop-like class offers spontaneous & prepared speaking tasks related to your studies and your academic work. Reading and extracting information, listening and some writing will be involved as much as visual literacy. Main features:
• Communicative English for academic contexts, focus on speaking skills and oral participation
• Hands-on familiarization with text types, academic conventions, critical awareness and skills
• Stimulating authentic & didactic materials for close reading, listening, viewing, interpreting
• Study skills, vocabulary and grammar practice, also for and through one’s own contributions
• Required tasks to develop or refine language skills for or close to academic-purpose English
• Topic-based classroom discussions, peer interaction across subjects and personal learning
Workload and evaluation
Contribute actively and attend regularly. To earn the credits for the course, you will also participate in tasks prepared at home and delivered in class, including a researched oral presentation that explicitly draws on academic sources published in English. You must upload documentation of your task work and a pass on three tasks.
Materials
There will be a mix of class materials, self-study resources and links to reference tools such as good online dictionaries. For some tasks, you will receive instructions and find your own material/sources.
COURSE AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES
The main objective is for you to dynamize, expand and refine your oral English, and to activate connections between speaking and thinking in English. You gain confidence in using speaking as a tool for testing understanding, thinking aloud, and cooperating. You explore and complete tasks to expand your autonomous language use and fill the English language gaps you discover by engaging with the tasks.
You activate & improve your oral capacities; gain experience as independent, intelligible users of English; pose questions and respond to them; you initiate and co-construct discussions. You demonstrate capacity for critical thinking & knowledge construction through the medium of English. You add to your academic literacy and explicitly draw on popularized or original research (e.g. selecting, evaluating & synthesizing information, citing sources) in English. You account for and justify your opinion, provide explanations for interpretations, and give each other feedback.
- Teacher: Iris Schaller-Schwaner