Übung Oral Skills

Description Oral Skills offers Bachelor of English students the opportunity to gain an in-depth awareness of their proficiency in spoken English, and to work on becoming more accurate, articulate, and fluent speakers. Designed for undergraduates in two parts, students should take ONE of EACH course, ideally in order. The first course, Podcast/Phonetics, aims to raise students' awareness of their own pronunciation of English, identify potential problem areas, i.e. pronunciations that may impede communication, and improve their comprehensibility as speakers for both the Language Skills II exam and general purposes. Weekly exercises offer students extensive practice and individual feedback on specific sounds or prosodic features. Students complete a podcast BN assignment in which they record their own speech and assess their performance. The second course, Presentation/Practice, looks at oral language primarily in the context of public speaking. Placing a focus on Language Skills II exam preparation, students practise giving and critiquing presentations. Weekly exercises build vocabulary for various presentation functions, and cover related oral genres in academic contexts, such as exams, discussions and debate. A secondary focus is placed on general fluency development, and students are encouraged to participate in a tandem language exchange with an American university student of German through the TandemPlus program. Registration Since space is limited, all students MUST ATTEND CLASS in the FIRST TWO WEEKS in order to confirm their space. If they do not, and do not contact their instructor, the space will be given to the next student on the waiting list. Students are also required to decide by week 2 whether to continue with the class for the whole semester, and notify their instructor if they intend to drop it. This way, students on the waiting list can be admitted in time to meet the attendance requirement and no spaces are empty. Students who are admitted to courses and drop out part-way through the term (without a formal excuse e.g. due to illness) will receive lower priority when registering to take the course again in a later term. Recommended texts (PODCAST class): we will use these for in-class exercises, and students will be expected to complete weekly readings to prepare for each weeks session. H. Eckert, The phonetics and phonology of English pronunciation, 2nd edition. Trier: Wiss. Verl. Trier 2005 (Library copies: anga440.e19; Second-hand copies are EUR 5 –10 on Amazon Marketplace; New copies are EUR 19,50 at the campus Stern Verlag). Chapter 1 of J. C. Wells, English Intonation – An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2006. (Library copies: anga817.w454). Habot-Jacobowitz, Alexandra Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2015/16 Butkus Katherine