COMM 100 English Speaking Fluency Development

(3)

Prerequisites: TOEFL score below 100 (or equivalent score on any English proficiency test). Instructor permission.
This is a student-centered course that utilizes interactive, two-way tasks to practice key aspects of speaking fluency: quantity of language produced, speaking speed, speaking without long awkward pauses, and the use of fillers and discourse markers. Intelligibility is the goal of student language production. Students will learn to negotiate for meaning (Long, 93) with their interlocutor in an environment with other second language users. Interwoven with fluency activities arc six units essential to speaking fluency: 1) Indirectness and Polite Speech, 2) Spoken Vocabulary i.e. Phrasal Verbs, 3) Word Stress, 4) Sentence Stress, 5) Reduced Forms and Connected Speech, and 6) Discourse Markers and Extended Discourse.

Students will leave this course with the ability to express their ideas, thoughts, and opinions more clearly and with greater confidence in their communicative competence in their communicative competence (Hymes, 1972). In addition, students will also improve their listening comprehension of the spoken English they encounter daily in classrooms, offices, athletic fields, dormitories, and audio/visual materials. Assessment in COMM 100 consists of five spoken summaries of short films recorded and uploaded to Blackboard, in-class extemporaneous paired speaking, in-class tests, in-class activities, and homework assignments.

Can be used to fulfill general education requirement.