These courses are designed to enhance oral communication skills (listening and speaking) through watching movies (online materials), and making your own movies in English. Students will get to practice their reading and writing skills, as well, by script reading and writing. We will watch different genres of short films together to learn common phrases and expressions in context, then answer Q&A online, and conduct discussions online. There are some phrases that have embedded meaning as well as literal meaning. For example, what does it mean by ‘Get out of here!’ when the speaker had the smiley yet surprised expression on his face when he said it? Do you really need to get out of the room? Or did the speaker mean something else? These acts are called ‘indirect speech acts’ and students will learn by experiencing them and other types of discourse techniques via role plays. The focus will be placed on learning by ‘speech act’ (such as ‘apology’ and ‘sarcasm’) but other patterns of pragmatic markers will be covered such as discourse markers, ‘​y’know’ within conversation.
Towards the middle of the term (Day 6 or so), students will study our original films (several skits made by the instructors and/or the SFC students), and they will answer the online quizzes and complete interactive sessions on the website. After learning useful expressions and phrases within context, students will be expected to develop their own scripts, and make their own movies in a group, utilizing what they learned in class. Attention should be paid to not only linguistic but also paralinguistic features such as tones as well as non-verbal ones (facial expressions, gestures, gazing, and body language). They are expected to learn autonomously online and in class interactively engaging with the instructor and the classmates in English.
It should be noted here that for much of the video study and production portions of this course, students can interact with students from Professor O’Donnell’s classes (Thursday 2nd B Level Listening Class and Thursday 3rd B Level Project Class) who will do similar video reviewing and making projects. Student work will be submitted and commented on online on a shared forum. This will allow for an iterative process of comprehension checks, discussion, and script feedback, and will make for a very robust and active learning environment, where students of different levels and backgrounds can come together to help each other achieve higher levels of language understanding and proficiency. At the end of the video making process, students will come together to enjoy and critique each other's creations, and to discuss how well the elements learned in class were incorporated into the student films.