Spoken English for Postgraduates

Northwest A & F University, Yangling, SHAANXI

English for M Sc Postgraduates

Spring 2012 Course aims and Timetable

Course aims This is to help post-graduate students focus on identifying their vocation in research work, extension, teaching, business, engineering or journalism. Students should improve their self-awareness and skill in using spoken and written English. The course should predominantly improve the student’s use of English in listening, speaking and writing linked to their vocation. A progression of exercises should encourage students to firstly speak confidently in English, during role play activities, then to learn to give professional presentations in an interesting way. Each group should take part in a debate. Group work is expected in role play, presentations and debate. Be prepared to begin group work in week 2. Material can be found within the course to match a range of expectations, from studying abroad to meeting university requirements of English skills (CET6). Please provide a passport photograph to allow the tutor to get to know you. One exercise will challenge you to find the main ideas from several pieces of writing and then use them to write a summary on the topic of “modern culture” in less than 300 of your own words. Submit digital copies of your writing. Give your name, a title and date at the beginning and references at the end of any writing. Computer file names should identify your name, class number and assessment code (1 or 2). At the end of the course, a resume should be submitted in English. Use the CV/Resume “format” file provided. Please get involved and be ACTIVE!……

Learning objectives     

Identify main ideas in a piece of film and express technical ideas clearly in written English Justify choice of vocation based on self-understanding * Improve self-awareness Become able to plan and deliver a spoken English presentation, in an interesting way Work in groups * Participate in debate in English * Take responsibility for individual learning. Achieve scores of 5 in all aspects of the rubric for spoken English assessment.

Learning material E-learning web site/DVD disk has notes on (a) writing (b) conversations (c) posters (d) CV and (e) vocations – covering a Business manager, Scientist, Technical advisor, Teacher, Engineer and Journalist. Writing study material can be downloaded from www.eoearth.org/article/Capitalism_3.0 Peter Barnes. 2006. Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (e-book) www.worldwatch.org Erik Assadourian. 2010. State of the world. Transforming cultures, from consumerism to sustainability. The Worldwatch Institute. www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=914 Tim Jackson. 2009. Prosperity without growth. www.seedsforchange.org.uk Doing it without leaders. ???? Examples of unprepared conversation topics (Topics from “BBC Learning English”) - download others if you wish! www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/2010/02/100218_6min_plastic_page.shtm Chinese footballers; Ding Junhui; Zheng Jie; Back to school; Boat race; Bonfire night; Celebrity chefs; Christmas lights; Crufts; Diana concert; Doing business; Edinburgh Festivals; Friends re-united; Giants humbled; Harry Potter book; Lewis Hamilton; London 2012; London Marathon; Look behind you; Love is in the air; Mother’s Day; Picnics; Pubs; Rainy Britain; School dinners; Snooker World Championship; Star of ladies tennis; Student life; Takeaway learning; Award winners; The charts; Trick or treat; UK students abroad; West end shows. www.bbc.co.uk/ukchina/simp/efl/index.shtml

Timetable Week

1 2 3 4 5

Dates 20th -24th Feb 27th Feb – 2nd Mar 5th – 9th Mar 12th – 16th Mar 19th – 23rd Mar

“Film” topic “The paradox of choice” – www.TED.com Student innovation “I do” – Episode 19 Family Album USA - Answer questions “Quality Time” – Episode 20 Answer questions “Big fish in a small pond” – Episode 21 Answer questions Presentation skills – drama, TV quiz, election G2, 3

Assessment

Activity Course outline

Class Participation

Role Play – 2 groups, Becoming famous – Boyfriend home Role Play – 2 groups, Quality time – New Hobby Role Play – 2 groups Sacrifice – Changing jobs What makes a good businessman? Leadership G1

Martin Parkes, Northwest A & F University, Yangling, SHAANXI – Rev Eng 12 Yang postgr time.doc

CP Groups 1,2 CP Groups 3,4 CP Groups 5,6 Group 1/2,3

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

26th – 30th Mar 2nd - 6th Apr 9th – 13th Apr 16th – 20th Apr 23rd – 27th Apr 30th Apr – 4th May 7th – 11th May 14th – 18th May 21st – 25th May 28th May -1st June th 4 - 8th June

Group 2/1,4

What makes a good engineer? G5 (Submit Summary writing 1) What makes a good journalist? G6 (Submit debate topics) Poster presentation 2

What makes a good scientist? G2 What is the world made of? What makes a good technical advisor? G3 6 Unprepared conversations – 2 minutes (oral marking) 1-12 class list 6 Unprepared conversations - 2 minutes (oral marking) 13-24 class list 6 Unprepared conversations – 2 minutes (oral marking) 25-36 class list Debate linked to business

Poster presentation 2

Debate linked to journalism

Group 2/1,4

Poster presentation 2

Debate linked to science

Group 3/5,6

Presentation skills – drama, TV quiz, election G1, 4 Presentation skills – drama, TV quiz, election G 5,6 What makes a good teacher? G4

Debate linked to engineering Debate linked to extension Evening interviews

11th – 15th June

Debate linked to teaching Evening interviews Curse of .. (film) (Submit CV writing 2) Evening interviews Evening interviews

Group 3/5,6 Group 4 Summary Group 5 Group 6 Group 1/2,3

Group 4, 5

Interviews Group 6

Interviews interviews interviews

Assessment activities Date 20th Feb – 16th Mar 19th Mar – 6th April 19th Mar – 27th Apr 16th – 20th Apr 9th – 27th Apr 9th – 27th Apr 30th Apr – 18th May 30th Apr – 1st June 25th May – 1st June 21st May – 15th June

Assessment Class participation points for answering questions. Group presentation – Teacher/ class assesses What makes.?. presentation Written summary (1) Unprepared conversation – Student assess Unprepared conversation – 2 students picked at random to comment on the conversation. Teacher score Poster presentation – class assess – see folder Debate –class assessment. Submit written CV (2) in professional format Interview – Teacher assesses a 10 minute discussion between pairs of students – any topic.

Mark 10 5 10 15 10 10 10 10 10 10

Listening strategies 1 2 3

Identify the main ideas based on who, what, where, when, why and how. Note details of problems, changes, reasons, numbers, dates and perhaps individuals. Write these details down.

Writing strategies All writing should identify the author – you!, title and date; ideally these details should be at the beginning. (i) Clearly understand the requirement for writing and the needs of the likely reader (ii) Use “brainstorming” to think widely about the subject (iii) Narrow down the information collected (iv) Prepare a first draft quickly, so all necessary ideas are included. Use a topic sentence for each paragraph. (v) Edit the draft to improve clarity, brevity, grammar and spelling. Maintain consistent tense and avoid brackets.

Writing Assessment Assessment criteria – Modern Culture Content: Broad scope 2 : Evidence of own writing 3 : Evidence of own thinking 3 : Gives answer to question set? 2 Style: Correct heading 2 Freedom from spelling and other errors 2 Was submitted on time? 1 Maximum mark 15 Score

Points

Comments


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Speaking Assessment Sheet Not interesting ---------- Interesting Did the speakers create interest in the subject? 1 2 3 4 5 No -------------Yes Did the group introduce themselves well and give a clear title? 1 2 3 4 5 No -------- Yes Did the speakers connect well with the audience, through body language? 1 2 3 4 5 No -------- Yes Was material presented in a logical sequence, with emphasis of important points? 1 2 3 4 5 Useful -------------- Not useful Did the speaker provide a useful summary? 1 2 3 4 5 No -------- Yes Did the group answer questions well? 1 2 3 4 5

Rules for debate • • • • • • • • • • • • •

One team proposes a motion ie “Money is a measure of success.” and presents arguments in favour of this idea. The second team presents arguments to oppose the motion The chairperson will invite each speaker to introduce themselves. One speaker (a) first presents arguments for the motion. One speaker (b) presents arguments against the motion. One speaker (c) presents further arguments for the motion with perhaps replies to the criticism of speaker (b). One speaker (d) presents further arguments against the motion and perhaps replies to the criticism of speaker (c) Each speaker has 3 minutes maximum. Having heard the speakers, the chairperson invites the audience to present questions to the speakers. Audience members should clearly state the person to whom they are addressing their question and their question. The chairperson might invite the opposing team to provide comment, following a question from the audience. After discussion, the chair will invite one speaker from each team to summarise best arguments favouring their ideas. The chairperson will ask the audience to vote either in favour of the motion or against it on the basis of the arguments they have heard presented.

Holistic oral language scoring rubric Rating 6

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Description Communicates competently in social and classroom settings * Speaks fluently Masters a variety of grammatical structures Uses extensive vocabulary but may lag behind native-speaking peers Understands classroom discussion without difficulty Speaks in social and classroom settings with sustained and connected discourse; any errors do not interfere with meaning Speaks with near-native fluency; any hesitations do not interfere with communication Uses a variety of structures with occasional grammatical errors Uses varied vocabulary Understands simple sentences in sustained conversation; requires repetition Initiates and sustains a conversation with descriptors and details; exhibits self-confidence in social situations; begins to communicate in class-room settings Speaks with occasional hesitation Uses some complex sentences; applies rules of grammar but lacks control of irregular forms (eg runned, mans, not never) Uses adequate vocabulary; some word usage irregularities Understands classroom discussions with repetition, re-phasing and clarification Begins to initiate conversation; re-tells a story or experience; asks and responds to simple questions Speaks hesitantly because of re-phasing and searching for words Uses predominantly present tense verbs; demonstrates errors of omission (miss words or endings.) Uses limited vocabulary Understands simple sentence Begins to communicate personal and survival needs Speaks in single-word utterances and short patterns Uses functional vocabulary Begins to name concrete objects Understands little or no English

* Understands the words and phases; requires repetitions * Repeats words and phases


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From “Authentic Assessment for English Language Learners: Practical Approaches for Teachers”. 1996. J Michael O’Malley and Lorraine V Pierce.

Barry Schwartz

TED.com 2005

I’m going to talk to you about some stuff that’s in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you have already heard. And I’ll try to make some annotations myself in case you missed them. I want to start with what I call the official dogma. The official dogma is what – the official dogma of all the western, industrialized societies – the official dogma runs like this. If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens then the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is that freedom is of in itself good, valuable, worthwhile. Essential to being human and because if people have freedom then each of us can act on our own to do the things which will maximize our welfare and no-one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The more choice people have and the more welfare they have. This I think is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to question it and it’s also deeply embedded in our lives. I’ll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my supermarket – not such a big one. I just want to say a word about salad dressing – 175 salad dressings in my supermarket – if you don’t count the extra virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own on the off chance that none of the 175, the store has on offer, suits you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up speakers, stereo player, tape player, tuner, amplifiers and in this one single consumer electrics store there are 6.5 million stereo systems. We can construct 6.5 million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one department store. You’ve gotta admit that’s a lot of choice. In other domains, the world of communications there was a time when I was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as you wanted it from Ma Bell, you rented your phone – you didn’t buy it. One consequence of that was that the phone never broke and those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are the cell phones of the future. My favourite is the middle one – the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer and torch. If by some chance you haven’t seen them in your store, you can rest assured that one day soon you will. And what this does – it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question….. And do you know what the answer to this question is no! It isn’t possible to buy a cell phone that doesn’t do too much. So is it in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Healthcare – it is no longer the case that in the US that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you well we could do A or we could do B. A has these benefits and risks and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do? And you say – if you were me doc, what would you do? And the doctor says, but I’m not you. And the result is – we call it patient autonomy – which makes it sound like a very good thing but really, what it is, is a shifting of the burden of responsibility from someone who knows something, namely the doctor, to some-one who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and not in the best shape to be making decisions – namely the patient. There’s an enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me which if you think about it makes no sense at all since we can’t buy them. Why do they market to us if we can’t buy them? The answer is they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed.


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Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice. As this slide is meant to indicate where we get to. We don’t inherit an identity, we invent it and we get to re-invent it as often as we like. And that means every-day when you wake up in the morning – you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had was that you got married as soon as you could and started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who? Not when and what you did after. Nowadays everything is up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students and I assign 20% less work than I used to and it’s not because they are less smart and it’s not because they are less diligent. It’s because they are pre-occupied with asking themselves “should I get married or not?”. Should I get married now or should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first? All of these are consuming questions. And they are going to answer these questions whether or not it means doing the work I assign or not and not getting a good grade in my courses. And, indeed they should. These are important questions to answer. Work – we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with technology that allows us to work every minute of every-day from any place on the planet – except the Randolph Hotel. There is one corner, but I’m not going to tell anyone about it. Actually, where the wifi works – I’m not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what does this mean, - this incredible freedom of choice that we have with respect to work – is that we have to make a decision again, again and again about whether we should or shouldn’t be working. We can go to watch our kids play soccer and we have our cell-phone on one hip and blackberry on the other hip and out laptop presumably on our laps. And even if they’re all shut off, every minute that we’re watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are asking ourselves should I answer this cell phone call. And even if the answer to this question is no, it is certainly going to make the experience of your kid’s soccer game very different from what it would have been. So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this… That is to say there were some choices, if it was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this. And the question is – is this good news or bad news? And the answer is yes! All this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect paradoxically is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I’ll give you a very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about 1 million employees and about 2000 different work places. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds that the company offered, the rate of participation went down 2%. With your offer of 50 funds, 10% fewer employees participate than if you only offer 5. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from it’s so damn hard to decided which funds to choose that you just put it off until tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that this not only means that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire, because they don’t have enough of money put away. It also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up on as much as $5000 a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes it look like this … You really want to get the decision right if it’s for all eternity – right? You don’t want to pick the wrong mutual fund or even the wrong salad dressing. So that’s one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the Martin Parkes, Northwest A & F University, Yangling, SHAANXI – Rev Eng 12 Yang postgr time.doc

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paralysis, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it’s not perfect, it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is that this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made. And this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are – the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. Second, what economists call opportunity costs. Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning about talking about how much the way we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine that, the attractive features of all the alternatives that you reject make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen.

Here’s an example for those of you who are not New

Yorker’s – I apologise. But here is what you are supposed to be thinking. Here’s this couple on the Hamptons, very expensive real- estate, gorgeous beach, beautiful sky. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? Well, damn it, this guy is thinking it’s August. Everyone in my Manhattan neighbourhood is away. I could be parking in front of my building. And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive options of these features are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here’s another example. Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well and about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is, that whenever you are choosing one thing and those other things may have lots of attractive features, it’s going to make what you are doing seem less attractive. Third escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time and when jeans come in one flavour and you bought them and they fit like crap and you feel totally uncomfortable and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times they started to fit and feel okay. So I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones and I said – you know I want a pair of jeans – this is my size. And the shop keeper said – do you want a slim fit, easy fit, relax fit, you want a button fly or zipper fly? You want stone washed or acid washed? Do you want them distressed? Do you want them boot cut, you want them tapered, blah, blah, blah. On and on he went. My jaw dropped and after I recovered I said I wanted the kind that used to be the only kind. He had no idea what that was. So I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans. And I walked out of the store – truth – with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible to do better. But I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. The reason is – the reason I felt worse is that with all these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had no particular expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavour. When they came in 100 flavours, damn it – one of them should have been perfect. And what I got was good but it wasn’t perfect. And so I compared what I got with what I’d expected and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I’d expected. Adding options to people’s lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that’s going to produce is less than satisfaction with results than even when they’re good results. Martin Parkes, Northwest A & F University, Yangling, SHAANXI – Rev Eng 12 Yang postgr time.doc

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Nobody in the world of marketing knows this, because if they did, you wouldn’t all know what this is all about. The truth is more like this…. The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in, we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation, the best you can hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret of happiness – this is what you all came for – the secret of happiness is “low expectations”. I want to say.. just a little autobiographical moment .. that I am actually married to a wife and she’s actually rather wonderful. I couldn’t have done better. I didn’t settle, but settling isn’t always such a bad thing. Finally one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of jeans, when there is only one pair available to buy, is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask yourself why – who’s responsible? The answer is clear the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans on display there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, even though the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them. They blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant – not the only – but significant contribution to this explosion of depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are too high and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think that they are at fault. And so the real result is that we do better, in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you – this is the official dogma – the one that we all take to be true. And it’s all false – it is not true. There’s no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There’s some magical amount. I don’t know what it is. I’m almost done… as a policy matter the thing to think about is this. What enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There’s lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I’m talking about is that particular problem of modern, affluent western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this. Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive difficult to install child seats don’t help. It’s a waste of money. What I’m telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices – it is not simply that they don’t help – they actually hurt. They actually make us worse off. If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people’ s lives be improved but our would be improved also. This is what the economists call a “pareto-improving move”. Income redistribution will make everyone better off – not just some people. Because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude – you are supposed to read this cartoon and, being a sophisticated person, say – what does this fish know? You know, nothing is possible in this fish bowl. Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world and that’s the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is that – if you shatter the fish bowl – so that everything I possible. You don’t have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fish bowl so that everything is possible you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fish bowl. This one is almost certainly too Martin Parkes, Northwest A & F University, Yangling, SHAANXI – Rev Eng 12 Yang postgr time.doc

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limited, perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fish bowl is a recipe for misery and, I suggest, disaster. Thank you very much.


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