Core courses
(RECOMMENDED TITLE) Clear Speech (Second Edition)
(PUBLISHER) Cambridge University Press
(comments) This is a wonderful program! It consists of a student book with
a listening diagnostic and plenty of opportunities for students to both
practice word/sentence stress, take focused dictations, learn the principles
of stress in the stress-driven syntax of spoken American English, and record
their own speech onto audio cassettes with guidance to teachers to evaluate
them. I use this text in a 17-week community college pronunciation course
which carries both college and university transfer credit. In addition to
the coursework, students attend ESL lab for a minimum of 2 hours each week.
There they listen to the audio cassettes that accompany Clear Speech, and
in addition, they are assigned a lecture-note taking text at their level of
comprehension. We show them how to take notes using numbers, dates,
abbreviations, and symbols. They tell us their notes (retell the lecture in
their own words) and we work on their individual comprehension,
pronunciation, and whatever else comes up, in brief, one-on-one meetings in
lab.
By the end of the semester, they have acquired an enormous amount of
vocabulary, note-taking skill, dictation practice, and focused
listening practice. They listen more attentively, know what to listen for,
do not hesitate to ask for clarification, and can process oodles more
English than they could at first. The titles of the lecture-note-taking
books we use are:
Introductory Topics, Selected Topics,
Contemporary Topics
(Publisher: Longman)
Intermediate Listening Comprehension,
Advanced Listening Comprehension,and Noteworthy (Publisher: Heinle & Heinle).
