About this class

The idea of this class is to give you maximum opportunity to speak about things that are interesting to you.

Students who best benefit from this class are those who have a basic command of English, but are not yet able to smoothly express their opinions.

We will have newspaper articles as one basis of discussion. In addition, you will bring an item to class each week and the first part of class will be devoted to discussion relating to that item.

Newspaper Articles
The articles will be selected from ones that I hand out and also from those that students provide. Any topic is OK, it is a common observation that political matters (in terms of policy proposals) and religion are difficult to talk about productively. Topics that require a lot of special knowledge are also not often useful. Anything that is of general interest to general people is best, in my opinion. If you find an interesting article, please send me the internet link or bring it to class and I'll see if we can use it.

Conversation Piece
It is often enjoyable to talk about something that you know a lot about, such as a book you have read or a CD that you enjoy listening to. That is the point of the "conversation piece". For example, one week I may tell the class, "Next week, bring a CD that you like to class." Then, in the first twenty minutes or so of the next class, you will be in a small group (3 or 4 students) and will talk about the CD you brought and the CDs that the other members of your group happened to bring.

It is a simple but effective way to practice stating your opinion, since each item that you bring has some meaning to you personally.

Conversation pieces work well for native speakers when they want to find something interesting to talk about, and from the past meetings of the Language Lab class I can say that they work very well for students as well.

Movie Scenes
Another activity we do is to watch a short scene from a movie to base our discussion on. There are many ways that we can use film as an item for discussion, for example: your reaction to the scene; a similar incident that happened to you or that you have heard about; describing the emotions or inner thoughts of the characters on screen; cultural comparison and so on and so on.

Sometimes we have used one movie during the semester, other times we look at several movies. We'll see how things go in 2008.

Language Study
If you have any questions about usage or grammar, please let me know by email or in class. I'll be glad to give a short explanation. It is useful to pay attention to language as "language" as well as to simply use it.

Notes
We will change groups twice each week so that you can meet everyone often.

If you have any questions at all, please let me know by email.

Text

No textbook will be used for the class, as explained above. However, I will provide printouts of any materials that I ask you to read.

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