Level Coordinators:

Litsa Georgiou      Office E-418 Phone:  (908) 659-5196 E-mail: georgiou@ucc.edu

June Pomann    Office  E-718A (908) 659-5121 jpomann@ucc.edu

 Prerequisites 

ESL Placement Test or ESL 015
 

Course Description

ESL Level 2 is a high-beginning academic sequence designed for students whose native language is not English.  The course meets four days a week, 12 hours a week for 15 weeks. The purpose of this level is to develop the students’ listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in personal and cultural contexts such as family, house and neighborhood, immigration, American geography, and education.

Students who are successful in passing this level move on to Level 3.  Students who need more time at the level must repeat the course.  In some cases a student may be able to skip to Level 4.  

 

Course Objectives/ Student Learning Outcomes

·   To demonstrate cultural awareness and knowledge of community resources, work, and basic U.S. history.

·  To comprehend short dialogues and narratives about familiar topics spoken slightly slower than native speed and restate main ideas and important details

·   To take simple notes

·   To participate in simple conversations and personal narratives with limited fluency, accuracy, and pronunciation.

·   To understand texts written in basic English about everyday situations and historical events and people.

·   To apply literal comprehension skills and introductory reading strategies, such as inferencing and predicting skills.

·   To be able to guess at unfamiliar vocabulary that is highly contextualized.

·   To write short descriptive and narrative paragraphs and short compositions that demonstrate control of content vocabulary and structures.

·   To comprehend and produce the items in the grammar/theme chart with accuracy and basic fluency in controlled situations.

·   To log on/off, locate and use Level 2 ESL software independently

 

Information Literacy
By the conclusion of the semester all students who pass this course will have demonstrated in at least one graded project, that they are developing familiarity with library sources. This should include attending a library orientation, obtaining at least one library source and incorporating it into an oral or written project.

 

Requirements

• Midterm exam – Students take midterm exam during the 8^th week of the semester.  It includes listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar.
• Final exam – Students in Level 2  take the same final exam. It includes listening, speaking,  reading, writing,  and grammar.
• Frequent tests/quizzes to test all skills.
• Daily homework
• Compositions, in class and for homework, a minimum of 6-8 writing assignments.
• Participation in class demonstrating basic oral and aural proficiency in small group and whole class discussions.
• Reading assignments based on the reading texts
• One hour a week of computer lab, utilizing level 2 multi-media software
• Library assignments
• Students are required to buy their own text books.

 

Student Resources

Required

Grammar Plus, 2^nd Edition, DeFilippo and Mackey, Addison-Wesley

Grammar Plus, Workbook, 2^nd Edition, De Filippo and Mackey, Addison-Wesley

Listen to Me, Foley, Heinle and Heinle

Introducing the USA, Broukal & Murphy, Longman

Literature for English, McGraw Hill

 Optional

Lifelines 2, Foley and Pomann, Prentice-Hall

Grammar Links 1, Butler and Podnecky, Houghton Mifflin

Read On 1, Mare, McGraw-Hill

 CALL:

Software programs include:  Dyned, Focus on Grammar, Longman Interactive, and WIDA

 

Suggested Final Grade Calculation

To pass the course and go to Level 3, a student must receive 75% as an overall final average for the semester. Student work for the complete semester will determine the final grade.  Possible final grades are: Satisfactory (S) , Unsatisfactory (U) or Stopped Attending (UF). Students who receive a U or UF must repeat the entire course.

 The final grade will be calculated as follows:

Final exam                                                            50%

Speaking                                                               10%

Midterm, other tests and quizzes                          20%

Compositions, projects, homework, class work  20%

  

Final exam

Listening                      20%                

Reading                       15%                          

Grammar                     40%

Composition                15%

Speaking                      10%

 

Suggested Methodologies, Assignments and Activities

 Speaking

Students practice asking and answering questions about personal and life skill topics; they practice describing; they learn to retell what they hear and read in class; they learn to relate personal experiences in the past, present, and future.

 Suggested speaking activities

• Sharing information, gathering information
• Discussion of topics related to reading, completion of group exercises, group composition writing
• Oral reports based on topics from their reading book or newspaper articles; reports about someone famous in their country or a favorite holiday
• Dialogues
• Weekly conversations in the ALC
• Pronunciation activities

Listening

Students practice listening to statements and questions about personal and life skill topics; they develop their ability to follow simple face-to-face conversations on basic real-life topics; they learn to find the main ideas and some important details in short narratives of gradually increasing length with some repetition.

 Suggested listening activities

• Stories about pictures, taped narratives and conversations, listening for missing information
• Simple note taking
• Dictations, whole-class and student-to-student

Reading 

Students read dialogues, descriptive passages, and narratives of increasing length and difficulty; they practice finding facts and drawing inferences from a text, identifying the main idea of a passage, and guessing meaning from context.  Students may also read longer assigned or self-selected material such as a book, short story, newspaper or magazine article and do an oral or written report. 

Suggested reading activities:

• Students can keep a special vocabulary notebook.

• Groups prepare a question or two about each part of the story and then ask the other groups.

• Groups discuss an opinion question.  All members must arrive at the same opinion.

•  Role play. One student is a character from a story.  The class asks her questions, gives her advice.

•  Students write a letter to a character in the story.

•  Students predict what is going to happen next in the reading.

• Students do a library project based on a topic from the reading, such as states and places in the USA, important facts about a president.

Writing

Students write compositions from one to three or more paragraphs.  They describe pictures,  write stories about pictures or other class material, narrate personal experiences, write reports about topics in reading; they learn the basic mechanics of writing: capitalization, punctuation  and indentation of paragraphs.  By the end of the semester, students should be able to write a composition of one page.

 Suggested writing activities:

·       Students keep a writing folder with first and second draft compositions

Students write stories about themselves, house and neighborhood, vacation,  their partners, home city

·       Students write a letter home

·       Students write about a picture 

Grammar

Students learn grammar in context and with the emphasis on students being able to use structures to express themselves in communicative activities.
Suggested grammar activities

·       Group/partner activities

·       Partner practice

·       Dialogues

·       Strip stories

·       Gap activities

·       Dictation

·       Scrambled sentences

 

CALL/ALC

Students will use networked and Web software in the computer lab with their classes once a week. Students are encouraged to spend additional time using the programs in the Academic Learning Center (ALC) labs.

 Suggested strategies

·       Students will begin to learn the mechanics and help features of the CALL programs.

·       Students will take notes in a journal on CALL work and the strategies they use.

·       Students will use CALL software in the ALC independently.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

ESL 022/023/024/025               Grammar/Themes Chart
 

Functions (statements & questions)	Possible Contexts/Themes (related vocabulary and expressions)	Grammar Points (statement, question and negative forms)
Giving and requesting personal and general information   Describing locations   Sequencing of  events   Describing daily activities   Talking about likes/dislikes   Agreeing and disagreeing	Education/Work   Self and Family   Neighborhood/Community resources   Health   Crime   Leisure activities/Vacations   The immigrant experience   Holidays   US historical events and people	Primary Contrast of verb to be/ present continuous/going to   Simple past   Future –will   Time expressions   Modal – can/could   Comparative and superlatives   Introduced Simple present   *Review of grammar points from previous levels

To comprehend and produce the items in the grammar/theme chart with accuracy and basic fluency in controlled situations.