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. Students are required to write a concluding paragraph to express his or her viewpoints every other week. Besides this, we will also 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. In the end of the semester, students need to design and present an interview or a play as the term project.