This section of Freshman English is designed to help students improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities in English through various activities and exposure to a wide variety of materials in English. Using resources such as personal essays, newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, podcasts, news videos, and intriguing talks on the Internet, we will focus on issues of current events or issues in the contemporary world as topics in our class. Students are required to finish an assignment before each class, probably including reading an article, listening to a podcast, or watching a video online, in order to equip themselves with necessary knowledge and vocabulary for class discussion. In class, we will further explore the topic of the week, either in the forms of debate or group discussion. Besides this, part of in-class activities will be designed for learning basic strategies of writing a college-level essay. We will start from how to express an idea clearly and precisely with correct punctuation. Students will be required to write a concluding paragraph to express his or her viewpoints every other week. Finally, we will focus on listening and speaking abilities in English. One-third of in-class activities will focus on practicing skills of listening and speaking, including pronunciation, intonation, and accent.