Listening is a first-year required course. Students are exposed to a variety of listening phenomena essential for comprehension of authentic, natural English. The material used in this class includes discrete-point, task-oriented and global listening training to build students’ comprehension of long conversations and lectures on a variety of topics, both familiar and unfamiliar. The listening skills focused upon in the course include previewing, listening for key words, audio vocabulary building, identifying reductions in speech, note taking, using outlined notes and recognizing rhetorical transitions.

The course has the following goals: 1. To help students improve listening comprehension in general and their listening fluency skills; 2. To help students gain accuracy in understanding frequent, yet troublesome aspects of “fast English”; 3. To help students develop academic note-taking skills.

1. NorthStar 4 Listeneng and Speaking (2009, 3/e) by H. S. Solorzano & J. p. L. Schmidt
2. MyNorthStarlab (2007) by Pearson Longman at www.mynorthstarlab.com