English 7 is the first skills-focused course of the Intermediate-Advanced Cycle in the Academic English Support Program (AESP). This course focuses on: language learning, aspects of spoken language, and academic communication. This topic is useful and interesting at this level because it helps the student face the most common academic problems they will have to solve on campus, and it allows them to understand why they have the difficulties they have in learning English, particularly in decoding and input. This increased knowledge will allow them to develop some learning and communication strategies to help them continue their English language learning outside class and after they leave the university.
Students who complete this course are able to understand and participate in everyday conversations as well as in class discussions about course content, including requesting and obtaining information, and responding to questions. They will accomplish this not only because of general development of vocabulary and structures but also because of their familiarity with some of the most important features of spoken English such as pausing and the English sound system.
Students will develop conversation management tools that will permit them to ask for help, schedule appointments, negotiate solutions, give and request opinions on familiar academic topics and course content.
In terms of pronunciation, interlocutors generally understand these students, although problems of intelligibility may at times interfere with comprehension. Students should, however, be able to attempt self-correction of pronunciation errors upon prompting by interlocutors.
Students can describe their speaking and listening abilities and difficulties in English. They have developed some awareness of their main obstacles to intelligibility and begun to exhibit self-correction techniques upon prompting. Students can identify independent techniques to improve listening and speaking ability and have kept a record of their activity and progress in this area. Students make conscious use of other listening strategies as well, such as predicting, inferencing, etc
Students will watch videos and listen to audios (or other media) directly related to the contents studied in class. Each video reinforces the topics studied in class and contributes to further discussions
