English for Effective Communication II: Listening and Speaking

Welcome to ENGL E210 English for Effective Communication II: Listening and Speaking.

ENGL E210 is a one-semester, five-credit, middle level course which focuses on developing your listening and speaking skills in social, academic and work contexts. The course, which seeks to integrate listening and speaking skills, is structured around some of the main functions of language.

Before you begin to study the course content, you need to understand how ENGL E210 operates, what the course covers and how its various parts fit together. You will find the answers to these questions in this Course Guide. Please read it thoroughly now and refer to it while you are studying the course.

ENGL E210 aims to:

• consolidate your listening and speaking proficiency;
• develop your listening and speaking skills for study, work and social purposes;
• enhance your awareness of verbal language use in different contexts.

Upon completion of this course, you should be able to:

1. Detect feelings and attitudes, summarize arguments and make inferences in listening to a variety of spoken genres.
2. Present effective oral reports by describing, narrating, explaining and elaborating meanings.
3. Persuade and negotiate effectively in work-related contexts.

The following table provides an overview of the course and suggests the amount of time to allow for completing each unit. However, as we all have our own pace of study, this schedule is only a guide. You can adjust it to fit your personal needs more closely. The estimated time, on average, which you need to spend on this course is about eight hours per week - although this will clearly vary depending on your proficiency in English. This estimate includes time for reading the study units and carrying out the practice activities in them, listening to/watching the audio-visual materials, completing your assignments, reviewing the study materials, attending the tutorials and preparing for your final examination.

ENGL E210 consists of this Course Guide, five study units and assignments, all of which are provided by HKMU.

Course Guide

The Course Guide tells you briefly what the course is about, what it contains and how you can work through it. It also gives you some information about tutorials and assessment.

Study units

As you saw in the 'Course overview', ENGL E210 contains five study units.

• Unit 1 deals with the skills needed to describe, narrate and explain events and experiences.
• Unit 2 considers the skills needed to summarize and express opinions and arguments.
• Unit 3 focuses on note-taking, discussions and presentations.
• Units 4 and 5 are concerned primarily with the development of the listening andspeaking skills you need to perform tasks and express yourself in English in the workplace. Unit 4 deals with the skills of explaining, reporting and proposing; and Unit 5 considers persuading, negotiating and participating in meetings.

Each unit includes specific objectives, as well as a very wide range of practice activities to help you to improve your English language speaking and listening skills.

Recommended books

There is no set text for the course.

However, for ENGL E210 - and indeed all your degree courses in the English medium – you will need a good English dictionary. We recommend either the most current edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English or Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, though there are also other very useful ones such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

Audio-visual material

The course includes a number of audio recordings which give you an opportunity to practise listening and speaking skills, and you are directed to them at the appropriate points in each unit. Video clips are also used to help you to develop your presentation and speaking skills. These recordings and clips can be accessed via the Online Learning Environment (OLE) under 'Multimedia'.

Assignment File

This file gives you details of what is required in your assignments, their due dates, how many marks each is worth, and how each will be graded. Assignments must reach your tutor on or before the due date. Please read the Student Handbook for the University policy on late assignments.

Your tutor

Before the course starts you will be advised by the HKMU Registry of the name, address and phone number of your tutor. Your tutor will:

• conduct tutorials for your group;
• assess and comment on your assignments;
• be available at certain times to help you by phone. (You will be advised of these times separately.)

Your tutor is your first point of contact with HKMU. Please consult him/her first if you face any problems. Your tutor will advise you if you need to contact the Course Coordinator.

Please note that it is not your tutor's role to give lectures on the course material. His/her job is to assist you when you run into difficulties and to arrange opportunities for you to put into practice some of the course concepts. HKMU encourages you strongly to make use of this assistance.

Tutorials and language laboratory classes

There are nine face-to-face sessions spread throughout the course. Eight of these sessions will be tutorials held in normal classrooms and one will be held in the language laboratory. The first session will be an introduction to the course and may take a different form from the other tutorials. The times, dates and locations of the face-to-face sessions will be sent to you before the semester starts, and you will also receive a Tutorial and Language Laboratory Manual which will suggest topics for your tutorial group and tutor to work on at each session. To benefit fully from the sessions you will need to have studied the relevant unit(s), including practice activities, beforehand.

Online communication

Students enrolled in ENGL E210 have an additional means of communication with their peers, tutors and Course Coordinator through the HKMU Online Learning Environment (OLE). The use of the online components in ENGL E210 is optional, but to enrich your learning experience, you are encouraged to use the online components. Please refer to the OLE User Guide and try to log in to the OLE system.

We recommend the following strategies for working through ENGL E210. Remember to contact your tutor for assistance and advice if required.

1. Read this Course Guide thoroughly.
2. Organize a study schedule. Refer to the course overview and to the suggested Study Schedule provided by your Course Coordinator for more details. Note the minimum time you are expected to spend on each unit and how the assignments relate to the units. You need to gather together all this information in one place, such as your diary or a wall calendar.
   When you have created your own study schedule, do all you can to stick to it. The major reason for student failure is falling behind with the course work. If you get into difficulties with your schedule, please let your tutor know before it is too late for help.
3. Turn to Unit 1 and read the overview and objectives for the unit.
4. Work through the unit, carrying out the activities and using the audio-visual material when indicated. Attempting the activities, and checking your responses against the feedback provided, is very important for developing your language skills. Check your understanding at the end of each section of the unit.
5. Regularly review the objectives for the unit to confirm that you have achieved them. Keep a note of any problems and discuss them with your tutor as soon as possible.
6. Follow the same strategy for each unit in the course, submitting the assignments when required. You will learn a lot by doing the assignments and by carefully studying your tutor's comments on them. The assignments have been designed to help you to meet the objectives of the course and, therefore, to pass the examination.
7. After completing the last unit, review the course and prepare for the final examination.

To complete ENGL E210 successfully you are required to pass both the continuous assessment (the assignments) and the examination.

Assignments

There are three assignments for continuous assessment purposes in this course. These three assignments, which are equally weighted, are together worth 40% of the total course score. Detailed information on the questions, how to approach them and the submission dates are provided in the Assignment File.

Final examination

The examination at the end of ENGL E210 lasts for a total of three hours and has a value of 60% of the total marks for the course. It includes a two-hour listening paper and an oral examination comprising a group discussion and an individual presentation. It will thus assess your mastery of the two language skills – listening and speaking. If you have completed the assignments and have acted on your tutor's feedback on your work, you will be well prepared for it. Further information about the examination, including a specimen examination paper, will be sent to you later in the course.

We hope that you find English for Effective Communication II: Listening and Speaking interesting and useful. The effort you put into studying it will be worthwhile, as good listening and speaking skills can help you to perform more effectively in academic, work and social situations.

We wish you every success in your studies.

When she developed ENGL E210, Anita Y K Poon (BA, MA, PhD) was an Assistant Professor in the School of Education and Languages at Hong Kong Metropolitan University.

Dr Poon has had extensive experience in teaching English as a second language in local and overseas secondary schools and universities. She has been the coordinator of the English Enhancement programme at the Language Institute of City University of Hong Kong and has also taught in the MA in TESL and the PGCertEd in TESOL at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Her areas of research interest and publication are ESL, language education, bilingual education and language policy.