Course content
General Focus:
- Improving listening and reading comprehension skills
- Expanding vocabulary (with a focus on linking words)
- Improving writing skills through self-correction exercises
- Practicing students’ ability to express themselves orally by participating in discussions and presentations
- Expansion upon and reinforcement of grammar knowledge
- Work on cultural topics and aspects of intercultural knowledge
- Project work: Research and presentation (oral and in writing) on a specific aspect of one of the course topics
Learning Objectives:
After completing this course, students are able to
- quickly understand a wide range of long, factual texts in detail;
- identify different opinions and lines of reasoning in long, complex texts;
- follow long speeches and more complex lines of reasoning, provided the topic is familiar and the speech/conversation features explicit signals;
- actively participate in discussions and explain and justify their own views through relevant explanations, arguments, and comments;
- prepare and clearly carry out a presentation in which they present reasons in favor of or against a point of view;
- discuss a topic orally and in writing, summarizing information and lines of reasoning from various different written sources, as well as reproduce the line of thought presented by a text and explain the advantages and disadvantages of various options;
- deliberately apply a range of listening and reading strategies as well as strategies to plan and correct oral and written texts.
Course Topics:
Course A:
“Political and Societal Debates”: The rental situation and gentrification; crime in popular culture and femicide; animal welfare; stolen art; right-wing extremism
Course B:
“Berlin - City of Science": 300 years of science in Berlin; imparting knowledge in museums; Berlin inventions, discoveries, theories, and their influence past and present; working as a scientist, career opportunities, equal rights in the academic world; citizens create knowledge: science for all (citizen science)