Spring 2008 Courses

Please call 432-2430 for additional information.

Spring Course Descriptions

I. Academic Speaking Skills and Vocabulary

This course improves your ability to think in English, your speech clarity, and academic communication skills. It also helps the student build a powerful vocabulary for expressing ideas. Each week the course lecture demonstrates a new strategy for successful communication in the department or in the classroom, and we explore the key word groups students need in their spoken academic language. Daily vocabulary building and communication exercises are required. The course meets for a weekly lecture (two hours) and a small group practice session (one hour).

II. Advanced Pronunciation

To follow or be concurrent with Academic Speaking Skills

This course offers a systematic survey of pronunciation, including articulation, rhythm, intonation, and the sounds of English.   The course helps students to speak more fluently, control their speech speed, improve their spoken grammar, and increase the clarity of their communication.  Students use speech software to analyze their pronunciation, and they submit spoken assignments to the class server for evaluation and personal coaching.  Students attend a weekly lecture and demonstration (2 hours) and a small group practicum (1 hour).  In the practicum sessions, students receive additional guidance in clear pronunciation as they apply new speech habits to academic and social communication tasks.

III. Advanced Communication Strategies: A Focus on Academic Presentations, Teaching, and the Seminar

This course will review some of the rhetorical practices of teaching and learning in American university settings.  After a brief consideration of adult learning theory, participants will work in small groups to practice specific techniques for effective participation in and leadership of seminars, research groups, and teaching sections.  Special attention will be given to active listening techniques, oral summary, directed questioning and similar facilitation skills to stimulate engagement with challenging academic material, student interaction and active learning.  Students will be assigned to small working groups responsible for designing, leading and assessing a class "seminar session."  Each class will also include vocal warm-up exercises, oral recitation work and brief daily writing assignments to improve the fluency and clarity of participants' academic English.  

IV. Advanced Integrated Skills: Reading, Writing, and the Memoir - Cancelled

This intensive workshop will provide practice in both oral and written communication as students engage in critical analysis of assigned readings from famous and not-so-famous American memoir writers. The course will increase a student’s confidence at expressing ideas in the seminar setting, improving vocabulary, fluency, and level of discourse. Assignments will include writing personal journals, reader responses to excerpts from outstanding memoirs, and eventually a written (and photographic) presentation of portions of the student’s own life story. Vocabulary expansion will be part of this class as well.

V. Oral Fluency Workshop: Exploring American Culture and the Human Experience Through the Visual Arts and Selected Readings

In this workshop students will engage in discussion and critical thinking while exploring issues of American culture and the broader human experience through the visual arts (film, photography, and television) and through readings (newspapers, short fiction, poems, and essays). The course will examine and discuss how these forms of expression can reveal both the unity and diversity of American culture. This workshop is recommended for students who wish to practice strategies for interactive communication and thereby to be able to participate more fully and confidently in classrooms, seminars, and meetings.

VI. ACADEMIC WRITING WORKSHOP

This course will provide an introduction to the requirements of academic discourse and to argument and analysis. This course is designed to enable graduate students to develop accuracy, clarity, and style as they approach academic writing tasks. Writing skills are reinforced through grammar and vocabulary practice and essay writing, revising, and editing. Appropriate evaluation and documentation of sources are also reviewed. Success in this course requires a willingness to devote several hours outside class time to preparing assignments.

VII. INDIVIDUAL LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

Priority is given to graduate students who have not passed the SPEAK test and to those who have already enrolled in a class through the English Language Institute; others may not be funded by the Graduate School. Their requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

This program offers a one-hour language tutorial each week with the goal of strengthening a student's language skills. It provides oral English language practice with a professional instructor, who will advise the student on grammar and structure, vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, pronunciation, techniques to control the pace of a conversation, and orientation to issues of American academic culture.

This program will begin in February and for most students will provide ten one-hour sessions. Students should complete an application form if they want to participate in this program. Students accepted into this program will be notified by the program director.

NOTE: THIS PROGRAM IS A SUPPLEMENT TO COURSE WORK AND DOES NOT SUBSTITUTE FOR THE COURSES LISTED ABOVE. PRIORITY WILL BE GIVEN TO STUDENTS ENROLLED IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE INSTITUTE COURSES THIS TERM OR IN PREVIOUS SEMESTERS.

For further information on all the above courses call Jan Hortas, Director, English Language Institute, 55 Whitney Avenue, Suite 430, at (43)2-2430.