Listening and Pronunciation

Course content

This course aims to develop students’ listening and pronunciation skills while gaining confidence in communicating in English. To develop students’ receptive listening skills, it employs authentic listening materials (i.e. academic and natural-setting samples) produced by diverse communities of practice to be analyzed as communication-oriented classroom activities. Starting from basic listening and phonetic skills such as discriminating minimal pairs and formulating phonetic transcriptions of problematic sounds focused in class, the course will focus on higher level listening skills and strategies such as note-taking, predicting, extracting specific and detailed information, guessing meaning from context, and getting the gist through content-based activities. Students will be provided with the fundamentals of listening and phonetics namely vowels, consonants, stress in words, rhythm and intonation as well as the usage of phonetic alphabet for learning and production purposes. Throughout the course, students will also be exposed to aural authentic listening materials such as interviews, movies, songs, lectures, TV shows and news broadcasts. This course also aims to equip student teachers with a strong sensitivity towards different accents of English language being spoken around the world. Collaborative learning through group and pair work will be encouraged.