The following schedule will be adjusted to accommodate the progress of the class.

Class time will be devoted to activities that allow students to practice and interact in English. To successfully complete the course, students must prepare the assigned homework prior to class and, while in class actively participate in class discussions and pair/group work. Your final grades are determined by the following course components:

• Participation (including attendance, effort on speaking in class, class notes): 15%


• Written homework assignments (reading journals): 10%


• Online course (including online and offline homework): 10%


• Group presentation (midterm): 15%


• Individual presentation (final): 20%


• Reading/writing exam: 30%

Participation

Your participation grade will be based on your attendance and the contribution you make to the learning experience of others. Contribution includes your in-class questions to the instructor, insights and comments regarding class content, and especially interaction with classmates in group and pair activities and interviews. Students are expected to take notes in class and turn in those notes at the end of the class to be counted for participation credit.

Attendance: Students must attend class. Those with three unexcused absences will fail the course. If a student is late three times for a class, it will count as an unexcused absence. Students who are absent must write a paper to make up for participation, but only two papers will be accepted per student. Beyond that, students will lose all participation points for absences.

Class work: Students will take notes in class as exercises in listening and speaking. For speaking exercises, just as in College English I, students mostly play the role of a reporter, interviewing each other in groups or pairs and writing information from what they gather. Students also write more this semester in reflection, using more advanced patterns of paragraph writing.

Written homework assignments (reading journals)

Students will read the assigned articles or short stories. For each reading, they will need to write a paper with the following components. First, they must write a detailed summary of the reading in one paragraph or more. Second, they must write another paragraph or more with their opinion of the part of the story/article that they liked the most and explain how it applies to their life. Students must support their opinions in two different ways: citing specific passages in the reading or share their personal experience as it connects to the content of the story/article. Students will complete six reading journals in the semester.

Online course

All students will be assigned the last three units of the course, which can be found on Moodle (Unit 4: PC Language; Unit 5: Non-Verbal Communication; and Unit 6: Globalization), including watching the videos, completing the online quizzes, and writing answers to discussion questions for homework. Students will be graded on their performance on the online quizzes and effort on written homework based on the discussion questions.

Group presentation

Students will plan and design their own social entrepreneurship, answering how their company plans to solve a local or global issue. Each student presents a different aspect of the project: the product or service and how it works; financial issues; and how the product or service will solve the local or global problem. In addition to content, students must concentrate on speaking confidently, clearly, and fluently in a formal presentation style.

Final individual presentation

At the end of the semester, students will give a presentation on ways in which we can build better relationships with people of other countries. They must give their presentation in academic paragraph style that we have learned in class, and base their content on what we have learned in the cross-cultural communication course, the film, and the International House story series. Students will be judged on content organization, fluency, grammar, and pronunciation. This is their moment to shine and show how much they have improved in College English after two semesters of speaking preparation.

Written assignments

In addition to reading journals, students will complete three major written assignments in the course. The first is the Statement of Purpose assignment completed for homework. The second is the assignment answering discussion questions in the online course completed for homework. The last assignment is the final writing test, in which students must use academic paragraph writing style to complete a composition based on the themes of the textbook.

Reading/writing exam

The content of this test is from the assigned readings (from various articles and from the International House Story Series) that students have read and interacted with in the course. There will be questions based on the content of the reading, in which students need to write answers in complete sentences. There will also be a longer writing component, in which students must write a composition in academic paragraph (short essay) form with the six writing skills that they have learned in the semester.

Textbook: To be determined and announced by individual teachers

• Supplementary readings: To be distributed in class.


• Resources:

VoiceTube: https://tw.voicetube.com

BBC Learning English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish

TED talks: https://www.ted.com/talks

LTTC BESTEP: https://bestep.tw/