Welcome to English Listening Comprehension 3! Instructor: Chris Gunn EJ 721

In today’s class, we will: (1) Discuss the course aims. (2) Discuss the course content. (3) Discuss assessment in this course.

Course Aims The aim of this course is to improve your listening comprehension/paragraph writing skills with the end goal of helping you pass the National Teacher’s Exam.

Improving Academic Listening In the first part of the National Teacher’s Exam there are usually 8 listening comprehension questions. As such, improving our academic listening skills should be beneficial for this part of the exam.

Improving Academic Writing During round two of the National Teacher’s Exam, students are asked to write up to 10 structured paragraphs in 4 hours. As such, improving academic writing skills, especially paragraph writing, should be beneficial for the second part of the exam.

Course Content Listening Comprehension We will be doing listening activities from a variety of sources, but the core of our listening will be coming from the series: Contemporary Topics Academic Listening and Note Taking Skills

The listening selections in this series present vocabulary/phrases/sentence structure at a moderately high academic level. The language used in these listening selections is based on a corpus of academic language so it is very appropriate for the task at hand.

On the other hand, the overall difficulty of the listening should not be beyond students in this class.

Course Content Paragraph Writing We are also going to look at one particular type of paragraph writing: Expository Writing

Expository writing means writing to explain something. It can involve describing something such the benefits/problems/characteristics of something.

In the last National Teacher’s Exam, candidates were asked to describe the characteristics of corpus-based dictionaries.

Expository writing can also involve comparing and contrasting something.

For example, in the last National Teacher’s Exam, candidates were asked to contrast two lesson plans based on lexical choice, syntactic complexity, and meta-language used.

In all of these questions candidates were required to write structured paragraphs.

Fortunately, almost all of the paragraphs can be written using a few simple formats (which we will study in this course).

So in summary, we are going to be looking at academic listening and expository paragraph writing with the hopes of better preparing ourselves for the exam.

It should be noted however, that this course is in no way trying to anticipate what the exam questions are. Instead my hope is to give you exam writing skills that will be useful no matter what questions happen to be on the exam.

Assessment The class will be assessed on a curve. In other words, there will be a relative scale. Some of you will get As, some of you will get Bs, and some of you will get Cs.

Assessment Your individual assessment will be based on several factors. (1) Participation in Class (2) Attendance (3) Your Notebook. (4) Paragraph Portfolio (5) Midterm and Final Listening Comprehension Exams

Participation in Class This counts for 10%. Good participation includes being awake, participating in discussions, asking questions, arriving on time and turning off your cell- phones.

Attendance This counts for 10%. Missing 1 hour will result in – 1%. Illness, military, and death in the family are excused absences. MTs and sports days are not.

Your Notebook This counts for 20%. You need a proper notebook. There is a heavy emphasis on note taking skills in this course. Your notebook should be organized and clearly reflect the amount of work you put into this course.

Your notebook. Your notebook should include the dates as well as good titles and task instructions when I put them on the board as well as excellent notes from the listening selections. You will need your notes for writing selections sometimes weeks after you have done the listening. If you don’t have good notes you will not be able to do the writing.

Paragraph Portfolio This counts as 20% You will be required to write several expository paragraphs during the course.

Midterm This counts as 20%. It will have short listening sections where you will be required to simply answer questions as you listen. It will also have one lengthy listening selection where you will be required to answer questions based on your notes and then write a paragraph.

Final This counts as 20%. It will have short listening sections where you will be required to simply answer questions as you listen. It will also have one lengthy listening selection where you will be required to answer questions based on your notes and then write a paragraph.