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

For those of you that have taken courses from me, 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. I seldom make paper handouts, but if you prefer paper, please take care of printing files yourself.

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Hereafter you will find a reasonably detailed synopsis of the respective classes we will enjoy this term.

Thus, with no further ado, here are the four units with their total of 15 sessions.

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Sessions #1 & 2 (Tuesday, October 18 & November 1) — Functional Communication 

The first two sessions will focus on equipping students with oral communication skills useful in GRIPS contexts, both formal and informal. With ample opportunity to converse about everyday life and current events, students will be able to enhance both their speaking skills and their confidence therein.

As often happens, some text will be added here ...

Class Material & Homework:

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Sessions #3-4 (November 8, 22) — Vocabulary 

Part 1

These two workshops will provide tools to help students improve their vocabulary. Beginning with an introduction to the notion of systematically learning lexis, students will then be introduced to online dictionary resources and corpus analysis. Workshops will be very participatory with students creating individual word ‘banks’ based on in-class readings as well as material provided by students.

In our class this evening, we'd like to address two points, the first of which is the nature of learning vocabulary. One aspect of doing so is the necessity of learning words (lexemes) deeply, which essentially entails learning several things about each lexeme. Toward that end, we'd like you all to help us create a Class Word Bank, which we'll be doing with Google Drive.

The issue that faces us, Good People, is where we find our vocabulary and, having found a source, which words (lexemes) we use. One source is, of course, oral communication and the listening incumbent therein. A second source is the written material that we encounter daily, either in our daily lives or in the academic work that we all eagerly pursue. This evening we would like to demonstrate the latter with this particular story about maritime defense in Southeast Asia, which is also here as a Word document.

Here we have an explanatory paper on Google Drive, which is where we will assemble our Class Word Bank.

Our second purpose is to provide a brief introduction to corpus linguistics. Because this is a large and growing area in our field, we've opted to add a separate page to only begin to scratch the surface. A useful (albeit ugly) place to begin is the Compleat Lexical Tutor, which is courtesy of Tom Cobb. As you'll recall, we looked some at how we can examine the different categories of words in a text (i.e., specifically, the 1000-word level, the 2000-word level, the Academic Word List, and the "other" words. Of the various things available on the Lexical Tutor webpage, the ones we will use this evening include the following:

We will also be looking at the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which comes to use courtesy of Brigham Young University in the US. You will recall that I mentioned a series of very helpful YouTube videos on using this corpus, the first of which is at this link.

Finally, feel free to follow this link to our resource page with some information on corpus linguistics.

Class Material & Homework:

Search tips for COCA:

If you're interested in exploring further, here is quite a corpus webpage here.

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Sessions #5-6 (December 6 & 13) — Listening, Note-taking, & Discussion 

This pair of workshops will feature an academic context in which students first listen to talks and lectures while note-taking, and then engage in discussions to review and critique the facts and assertions presented by the speaker. Each workshop will consist of this three-step cycle, which is repeated across different topic areas. Language focus will be provided as necessary.

For our enjoyment during these two sessions, we have chosen material based on the fascinating world of biology.

Classroom Material:

Sessions #7-8 (January 10 & 24) — Short Writing 

(Jan 10) This particular workshop will focus on the seemingly straightforward yet ubiquitous and vitally important area of e-mail.

Classroom Material:

(Jan 24) In this final session of our series of workshops, we will focus on abstracts. An abstract is a short statement or summary of the article in question and is of crucial importance to engaging your reader's interest.

Classroom Material:

Bonus Material — Abstracts and Such 

OK, Gentle Students, today we will look at language used in some abstracts from the academic world. As you will see, this is a very basic procedure that you will find provides some insight into the structure of abstracts. Incidentally, this will also provide you an opportunity to become more proficient in the use of Excel.

Homework:

In these sessions we will delve into the oh-so-necessary world of abstracts. This are short, concise statements that are often what determines if a reader will choose to actually read your article or come to watch your conference presentation. Thus, Gentle Students, these are crucial.

Abstracts, as you will see in the examples below, are relatively brief summaries that appear at the beginning of an article. Often they mirror the organization of the article or presentation yet must follow certain guidelines (e.g., number of words). Let's begin with a look at a how abstracts are often organized.

Class Material:

Homework:

In today's session we will spend much of our time working with the abstracts from last week or receiving feedback on your earlier homework.

Homework:

This class will be devoted to crafting proposals for conference presentations, which is a scenario you might well encounter in the future (and I hope you do so!).

Readings: