Welcome to Intermediate Listening! If you think listening is merely sitting there, doing multiple choices and filling in the missing information, this course would offer you another alternative, a more self-reflective learning experience. Since our ultimate goal is to improve you overall communicative competence, the role of listening in this course is not defined as a passive decoding process but a more critical step in communication, that is, how you listen to catch the ball and toss it back in developing conversation in real life situations.
::::To achieve this goal, we would first start with fundamental listening skills, including consonant and vowel sounds, basic phonological rules like reduction and the variation of intonation. This basic understanding would help you to catch up with the speaking speed of native speakers, and meanwhile better your pronunciation. Next, students struggle with listening mostly get lost when they face something they could not understand. Therefore, helping you understand your own listening habits and further cultivate your own listening strategies would be our major focus. By the end of the course, you are expected to listen critically-be able to evaluate, predict and respond instead of merely decoding the messages. Please go to LINKS for the free online listening sites we are going to work on in this course.

Objectives:
::::::To differentiate vowels and consonant so as to improve pronunciation.
::::: To familiarize key phrases and expression in daily conversation and news broadcast to catch the gist.
::::: To identify details such as numbers, prices, time and location in conversations, lectures and announcement.
::::: To performance above-mentioned skills and understanding the received messages.

When completing this course, students are expected to
::::: understand pronunciation rules, reduction and linking sounds and intonation.
::::: exposed to a wide variety of listening task, including both one-way, lectures, radio programs, public announcement, and two-way communication, chats, interviews and inquiries.
::::: analyze the content to identify the roles of speakers, infer their intentions and predict the following development.