The purpose of this course is twofold: (1) to further improve your listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities in English through a course design that emphasizes the integration of the four skills, and (2) to help you develop academic skills that can help you transit successfully from high school to university classes. To achieve these goals, you need to finish the assigned readings before class and participate actively in class discussions. You also need to complete the following two tasks:

Character performance: You will work in pair and select a short clip from an English TV program or film and imitate those characters in the clip. You should show the clip to the class first and give a mini-lesson based on a handout with complete transcript of the dialogue in the clip. After that, you will perform the episode in the clip in front of your classmates. Your goal for the performance is to imitate the characters’ voice patterns, body movement, pitch and intonation, etc. as closely as you can.

Theme-based learning project: You should compile a learning project based on a topic of your choice. In the project, you must demonstrate your efforts to practice all four skills with materials about the topic. You also need to create a personal blog for the project. You will need to post all assignments related to the theme-based learning project on your blog and also respond to other people’s postings on their blogs. At the end of the semester, you will present your project to the whole class.