340032 UE Listening Competence and Text Production: English (2019W)

"What do I say?
What do they get?
Is what they get what I said?
Is the feeling they got what I gave—due to their response—called
satisfaction?"
[N.N.]
In this class on listening comprehension & textual creation, you will experience a challenging but cooperative, collaborative and supportive environment in which you can experiment with your own individual communicative resources (metaphor of repertoire: whatever you bring to this class—let’s play with it, strengthen it, further develop it!). Classroom cohesion will be of vital importance because it contributes to reducing the fear of embarrassment. We shall aim at group accomplishment—with regular peer reviews in and out of class.
It is important to note that peer review does not aim at intervention and (immediate) change (i.e. we won’t discuss do’s and don’ts; no simple cause-effect relationships). Peer reviewing can help us to gain a more realistic assessment of our own (textual) agency. It strengthens reflection on matters of choice, alternative, and consequence: intended (we—as speakers) and experienced (we—as listeners).
This class is no casting show. We won’t compare individual achievement. Students will come from various backgrounds and walks of life with highly varied communicative resources. A passing grade means that you have visibly reduced the fear of doing something inappropriate or wrong (no linguistic policing) and strengthened or even widened your individual repertoire. Two maxims will guide our work in class: clarity & impact.
By understanding English as a pluricentric code (Global Englishes, Lingua Franca Englishes, Translingual Englishes), this class encourages rethinking deeply entrenched notions of language as quasi-natural (and thus neutral) stable structures or entities (traceable, dissectable, measurable) that can be linked to similarly stable speech communities (with the idea of ‘native speakers’ as ‘ideal’ representatives).
Acknowledging pluricentricity immediately brings questions of language ideology, the politics of linguistics, and notions of prestige, authority, privilege, and arrogance to the fore. If we hear many accents or pronunciations but ‘receive’ (and thus accept) just one of them (Received Pronunciation), then the implication is that others should be rejected or refused (and, by the by, who received it?). Acknowledging the pluricentricity of the English language continuum opens our classroom doors to all of its speakers, with their individual or group-related ways of speaking (and listening, or writing and reading). Here, working in Englishes means entering into a continual process of variation.
There are many ways of how people in various walks of life negotiate meaning and co-construct their means of communication, accommodate to each other, and draw on their heteroglossic repertoires within the English-speaking continuum. Treating everything that is beyond Her Majesty’s or Uncle Sam’s grammar as an exception (or even stigmatizing it as deviation/aberration: ‘defective’/‘bad’/‘broken’/‘terrible’) also means reducing our scope of action to a minimum (self-confinement).
This class will introduce you to varieties of English with which most of you probably have had little or no experience so far (but quite realistically might come across in professional life), thus countering deficit-orientation—memba? there are many ways!—and facilitating adaptation to variation.
Learning objectives:
(1) to help students improve their listening comprehension and discussion skills;
(2) to hone students' performance skills with a focus on the communication situation and text organization.
Live listening with retelling (or written reporting) and out-of-class recordings.
Individual, pair and group work.