ELI 70 (Section 5) : Intermediate Listening and Speaking
Instructor:
Email:
Vivian Machida
vmachida@hawaii.edu
Office hrs:
Meeting Times:
Office location:
Moore 119; TR, 1:30-2:45
or by appointment
Course Goals:
The primary goal of ELI 70 is to help students improve their oral communications skills.
Secondary goals include increasing students' awareness of and confidence in their oral English
abilities. This will be done through:
• Maximizing opportunities for students to practice their listening and speaking skills
both in and out of the classroom.
• Student self-assessment of and reflection on their own listening and speaking abilities
• Introducing and practicing academic skills such as note-taking, participating in
class discussions, and making oral presentations
I ended up spending very little time on note-taking and oral presentations and
ended up spending a little more time on pronunciation, particularly
intonation (which kind of fell in with discourse strategies. . . ie. how to
use intonation to soften or strengthen disagreement), sentence stress,
linking and reduction. Quite useful and the students seemed very interested
in this as well.
• Introducing and practicing discourse strategies
This is the third time I've taught this course and I'm beginning to think that
teaching pragmatics is the most important aspect of 70 for two reasons. The
first being that students obviously need skills like learning how to distinguish
polite speech from impolite speech, how to disagree w/ someone, how to
interrupt, etc. The second reason is that by teaching these skills explicitly, the
students begin to understand that in an American classroom, not only are they
allowed to interrupt, disagree, etc, but they are sometimies expected to do so.
Ever since I started concentrating on these skills, I've noticed that although the
quantity of student participation/comments hasn't necessarily gone up, their
willingness to interrupt, disagree, and engage in other face-threatening acts have.
Course Materials:
1) Textbook: Quest, Listening and Speaking in the Academic World, Book 3 (1999)
Overall, I like this text. It had a diverse range of topics, of which I only
chose to cover 4 chapters. The discourse and pronunciation sections in each
chapter were rather nice, and could easily be expanded to go more in depth.
I have two criticisms of the book, however. The first is that not enough background
material is given in order to understand the academic lecture at the end. I spend a
lot of time creating supplementary materials in order to make the topic more substantial
and meaningful. This is pretty easily done thanks to the the resources you can find
on the net. The second thing is that the notetaking outline that accompanies the
academic lecture at the end of the text is sometimes out of order and rather
confusing to follow. I would attempt to take notes using the outlines and end up
rather lost on some parts. I would be careful w/ using these and make up my
own note outline, or not even give the students an outline to follow, allowing them
to take notes in the style they wanted.
2) One blank 30 minute audio cassette tape
3) An audio tape recorder (optional)
Used #2 & #3 for a pronunciation project focusing on sentence stress and
linking. This is the first time I've done a project like this. Haven't gotten
student comments from the evaluations back yet, but it'll be interesting to
hear whether they found it useful or not.
Course Requirements
This is a Credit/No Credit course. In order to receive a Credit grade for this course, you must
complete and receive credit for 85 % of the total possible points assigned throughout the
semester. Students who fail to receive a Credit grade must retake the course. Assignments
include:
(1) Classwork: will focus on various listening and speaking activities and strategies.
Class participation is a vital part of the course requirements. As this is a listening
and speaking course, you will be expected not only to listen, but to speak up and
participate in class and group discussions as well.
Difficult to keep track of class participation in small group and classroom discussions,
(2) Homework: will focus on improving conversational speaking and listening skills
outside of the classroom. Homework will consist mainly of conversation
and vocabulary exercises as well as observations made of English speakers.
Useful. Make sure to consistently check whether HW has been completed or not.
(3) Quizzes: Periodically, you will be given quizzes to check on your progress
Definitely a must. This is one of the few ways to assess progress, retention, and
listening comprehension. Had several types of quizzes in my class:
Textbook chapter quizzes: like a real test in a real classroom, based on
the material covered in the textbook, lecture notes, and points
brought up in discussion in class. Made these open note/text to
in order NOT to make these quizzes an exercise in memorization but
to judge accuracy of notetaking and comprehension during discussions.
Discourse Strategies quizzes: had students construct pollite, impolite, neutral
dialogs on paper. Would have been more effective if it had been done
orally and one to one with me but would have taken too much class time.
Maybe do this outside of class as part of out of class conferencing?
Pronunciation quizzes: listening and multiple choice quizzes focusing on
factors such as reduction, linking, sentence stress, intonation, etc. You
could really see in these quizzes which students were having problems
with hearing these things. Haven't developed an effective quiz for
testing the production of these things yet, although the pronunciation
project I did helped with that somewhat.
(4) Presentation: Students will work in small groups on two in-class presentations, more
details will be given later.
I only did one very short, very informal presentation and ended up doing a
pronunciation project in lieu of the 2nd presentation. The purpose of the presentation
wasn't so much to teach how to do presentations (which is done in 80 extensively), but to
give students a chance to become somewhat familiar with getting up in front of a group
of people in order to talk informally and ask questions. Each day, one student, would
spend about five minutes in the beginning of class presenting their topic. The students
were told to find a newspaper article or current event topic and present the main idea.
They asked the audience its opinion on the topic. They also answered, to the best of their
ability, any questions that the audience brought up. Overall, the presentations went well,
but some things could have made it better. I asked the students to bring in copies of their
articles, but they ended up being distracting. Next time around, I would ask them to
prepare a simple visual or handout outlining what they would present. Also, audience
attention was also sometimes a problems. I had a few bad eggs who wouldn't pay
attention or weren't very serious about what others had to say. To fix that, I would have
the presenter prepare a simple quiz (1 or 2 questions) on their presentation. Have the
presenter grade the quiz and report back to you w/ the results. Would have been a good
listening comprehension tool as well as feedback to the speaker as to whether
they were comprehensible or not.
(5) Conferencing: Although students will not be given a grade for conferencing,
they will be expected to come in at least once during the semester for a
conference on their progress in the course.
I ended up not doing individual conferences out of class this year, but gave students
individual feedback during class time. Worked out better this way, I think.
Grades
would put a little more emphasis on the quizzes.
Assignments:
40%
in-class work and homework
Class Participation
25%
group work, class discussions
Quizzes:
20%
Presentations:
15%
2 presentations X 7.5%
30%
25%
25%
15%
Absolutely no late work will be accepted!
Attendance/Tardies
Students who have 8 total absences will automatically receive a No Credit grade for the semester.
Tardies (being more than 5 minutes late to class) will be counted as an absence. Also, if you
know you are going to be late or absent, it is your responsibility to ask for your classwork and
homework assignments.
This needs to be changed. With 1.5 hour classes, the # of total absences allowable should be
changed to something like six. Eight might be doable w/ 50 minute classes. I had several
students come close to the limit, and they ended up missing some important parts of class. So
hard to do make up work in listening speaking classes, when the majority of the work is
discussion driven, or done in groups and pairs.
Important Dates
August 28 (T): First day of class
November 22 (R): Thanksgiving Day, no class
December 13 (R): Last day of class