Welcome to Academic Communication for Japanese Speakers, which is, as the name suggests, a course designed to help you succeed when communicating in academic contexts that you will likely encounter at some point in your travels.

This course is designed for Japanese students who wish to learn to engage in academic communication in English. The course will offer a variety of tasks that resemble language use in real academic contexts. Starting with simple listening and note-taking activities, students will gradually be familiarized with academic discourse and vocabulary. There will also be opportunities for speaking, from simple question and answers to group discussions and debates. As the course proceeds, students will select a topic of interest and step-by-step develop this into a poster presentation. The course will end with a real poster presentation session in which students will present and answer questions about their chosen topic. The overall goal of the course is for students to experience and gain confidence in communicating knowledge and ideas in English. Although the primary approach is to learn by doing, complementary focus on grammar and other language features will be offered when needed.

If you would like (for some inane or perhaps insane reason), here is the course syllabus for your reading pleasure. Of course, we reserve the right to amend it, so please treat this as a guideline.

For those of you that have taken courses from us, you will recall that we have had no textbooks, and in the present course we will also have no textbook. Class material will be available on both Dropbox and Google Drive, and feel free to download, save, print, or otherwise use it. We seldom make paper handouts, but if you prefer paper, please take care of printing files yourself.

You might be wondering about the course requirements. Not wanting to scare people away, we have wisely included them way, way, way down at the bottom of the page in 2-point font. Actually, you will find them hiding down below, but just not in 2-point font. Let's cover some admin things, just for fun.

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Hereafter you will find a reasonably detailed synopsis of the various class meetings ("sessions") that we will enjoy this term.

Sure, you were about to ask, right? That, Good People, is a sextant, a very necessary tool for navigation in the pre-GPS age.

Online lectures on sustainability (Academic Earth.org)

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Session #1 (Wednesday, April 6) — Introduction; Vocabulary Development 

As often happens on the first day of class, we'll be speaking in somewhat general terms about our course and some of the topics therein. First, note that this course includes all four skills that appear in academic work: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. There are, of course, certain requirments for this course, as is true for every course; please scroll down to the specific courrse requirements for your enlightenment.

We would also like to introduce our class Word Bank. You are cleverly asking what that might be, of course, to which we would answer, "A bank of words." Seriously, it will become an online collection of vocabulary words that you notice and take steps to learn. It involves using Google Drive.

We have chosen to conduct this course under the umbrella topic of sustainability, which is a subject of growing importance as we face myriad challenges associated with global warming. For an interesting warmup exercise, you might peruse this handy list of common myths about sustainability, courtesy of Scientific American. Thus, our class material includes readings, videos, and other things as we come up with them.

We'll finish this evening's class with an overview of academic listening. Here we have an entertaining talk on sustainability by Dr. Justin Mog at TEDxUofL 2012.

Homework:

Session #2 (April 13) — Academic Listening & Note-taking 

Keeping with our theme of sustainability, this evening we'll listen to and then take notes on a lecture given by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. We'll refer later to the transcript, which is located at this link.

In the second half of our session this afternoon, I'd like to provide a brief introduction to corpus linguistics. Because this is a large and growing area in our field, I've opted to add a separate page to only begin to scratch the surface. Follow this link to our resource page with some information on corpus linguistics. This particular skill will be useful when you add words to our class Word Bank, and we suspect you'll find it to be an interesting and effective to enhance your vocabulary knowledge.

Homework:

Session #3 (April 20) — AL & N-T, Part 2 

Our first task this evening is to again enjoy some listening and notetaking practice, and we will return to Professor Sachs' lecture from last week.

Our second task is to extend the material in the lecture into an oral summary. Having taken well-organized notes with considerable detail, you will, of course, be able to effectively summarize the lecture. Of course. This we will demonstrate for you, Gentle Students.

Third, we will devote some time to playing with our trusty corpus analysis tools. You should be adding vocabulary to our class Word Bank each week, and these corpus linguistics tools provide a powerful and easily-used method to enhance your additions to the Word Bank. Here you will find an explanation of the Compleat Lexical Tutor Vocab Profiler. You might also refer to the Academic Word List when compiling your Word Bank vocabulary.

Class material and homework

Session #4 (April 27) — Oral Reports 

OK, Gentle Students, today we will first enjoy a series of short oral reports on the respective lectures. As you recall, each member of your "family group" will have listened to a different lecture, so that member needs to summarize his/her lecture for the other group members.

Session #5 (May 11) — Oral Reports 

This evening we will devote some time to the Forest Response reading that was assigned last week.

Our second task is to buttress these oral skills with some non-oral work. More specifically, we will begin the first of our series of readings on the rather broad topic of sustainability.

Class material and homework

We might also (time-permitting) spend a bit more time on corpus linguistics this evening. You'll see relevant sites in the April 13 session, but we'd like to also point out that Oxford has a fine collocation dictionary that you might find useful.

Session #6 (May 18) — Social Consequences: Climate Refugees 

The issue of sustainability comes, of course, with effects on society. In our next two classes, we will consider an issue of pressing importance not only for this group of island-dwelling people in the US but also for citizens of such low-lying countries as the Maldives and Tuvalu. (OK, can you find Tuvalu on a map?)

Class material and homework

Session #7 (May 25) —  Economic Aspects  

In today's session we will be addressing the economic side of this sustainability issue.

Class material and homework

Session #8 (June 1) —  The Urban Scene 

In this session we will talking about the development of cities and movements into or away from cities. Naturally, the concentration of people in cities has been going on for thousands of years (witness Alexandria!), and continuing population growth will very likely lead to the creation and development of more cities. The image to the left is of Ted the Politician, which seems fitting for a session devoted to urban issues.

Class material and homework

Session #9 (June 8) —  Urban Scene, Part 2; Debate Preparation 

This class will be devoted to finishing any remaining discussion or other things from previous classes and then spending some time in preparation for the debate(s) in next week's class.

Class Material:

Session #10 (June 15) — Debate Rehearsal 

As you good folks know, our class today will be devoted to further preparing for next week's debate. We might also look in some detail at the various parts of a debate (see the handy documents below).

To help you on your journey:

Session #11 (June 22) —  Debate 

As you good folks know, our class today will a series of finely-crafted debates.

Session #12 (June 29) —  Poster Design Basics 

Our task today is to examine details about the poster presentation. I'd like to begin with a quick look at some typical boards on which posters can be displayed. Second, let's have a glance at some posters I've seen over the last year or so.

What about printing your posters? We have permission to print your fabulous, colorful, optimally informative posters here at mighty GRIPS, so we will be doing so between July 11 (Monday) and our class on July 13. Thus, folks, you would need to have your poster constructed and submitted by July 11.

As we announced in class this evening, you may ask the IT people to install Microsoft Publisher on your GRIPS computer. This should take 10-15 minutes.

Now, Good People, what topic might you want to enlighten everyone about? Under the umbrella of sustainable development, you might consider the various sub-topics that Professor Sachs included in his series of lectures (the first of which you'll remember from an earlier class). These lectures constitute the foundation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted in September, 2015.

 Class Material: 

 Presentation Video Clips: 

Session #13 (July 6) —  Describing Posters & Answering Questions 

Courtesy of George Hess, here is a very useful video on giving an effective poster presentation.

Another area that is crucial for doing an effective poster session is the Q&A part. Recall that the speaker makes a shorter speech—say, five minutes. The listener often then poses questions, which you, Gentle Student, should be prepared for! Thus, consider what questions might be asked. Of course, also think about how you can answer those questions.

Recall that I like to hear two things when someone asks a question. The first, of course, is to thank that person for his/her question, and the second is to repeat the question. Yes, repeat the question. Why, you ask? Well, you should make sure everyone heard and understood the question, and you also should make sure that you understood the question. Of course, you can either repeat the question verbatim (i.e., exactly as it was asked) or paraphrase it, but the important thing is to repeat it. Let me repeat that: repeat the question.

Here are my Q&A guidelines.

 Q&A Material: 

 More Class Material: 

Session #14 (July 13) —  Poster Rehearsal

As you have cleverly surmised, today will be spent doing final preparation for and then having a rehearsal for our poster session next week.

Session #15 (July 20) —  Poster Session; Class Summary

Finally, we arrive at the summit—our poster session.