Course syllabus

Course-PM

FSP055 English HT21 (7.5 hp - note this is a pre-university course and cannot be included in a Chalmer's degree - check your university back home if these credits will be accepted for what you need them for).

  • English is an optional English language course offered by the Department of Communication and Learning in Science open to Chalmers students from any discipline.
  • The course is intended mainly for basic to intermediate students who need to strengthen their ability to speak, write, and understand English.
  • This course runs over study periods 1 and 2, which means that this 7.5 credit course runs between 30 August 2021 and 16 January 2022.
  • An outline of each week’s activities and assignments can be found in the Schedule Overview. The Canvas Calendar function is also useful for keeping track of these.

Contact details

Ideally, please use your Canvas Inbox as the main channel of communication for personal questions. For course questions that all students can benefit the answer from, please use the discussion forum. For general course updates or information, the teacher will communicate via Announcements.

Course purpose

To prepare students who need to use English in their studies at Chalmers. The course is intended mainly for basic to intermediate students who need to strengthen their ability to speak, write, and understand English.

This course aims to guide you in being able to select, structure, and present material from your field of study to a non-specialist audience in English in a clear and effective manner. You will be able to more comfortably understand, summarise, and reformulate the main content of oral presentations and lectures in speech and writing. By the end of the course, you should be able to prepare and write short coherent descriptions of technical content based on your field of specialization or your peers'. With these means, it is hoped that you will become accustomed to applying a more process-oriented approach when working with texts and oral presentations.

Learning objectives and syllabus

The successful student is able to:

  • express himself/herself clearly in both speech and writing in prepared situations. (The focus is thus on strengthening the student's communicative competence.)
  • select, structure, and present material from his/her field of study to a non-specialist audience in a clear and effective manner.
  • understand, summarise and reformulate the main content of oral presentations and lectures in speech and writing.
  • apply a process-oriented approach when working with texts and oral presentations.

Course design

Teaching and assignments

You will practice your oral proficiency through some discussion, mini-presentations, and exercises. There is a strong focus on pronunciation, stress, and intonation. You will present individually and be asked to summarise the content of presentations given by your peers in both speech and writing. Here, phraseology and the structuring of oral presentations are introduced. Written proficiency is also part of the course and will be practiced through summary writing. Some analysis of English grammar and vocabulary will be included.

The course involves four class meetings and a number of asynchronous activities. As of 21 June 2021, the decision is to run these meetings on campus. Below is a simple overview of the setup. "weeks" refers to course weeks, not weeks of the year.

Dates

Modules

30 August-10 September

Getting started (weeks 1-2)

10 September

Meeting one

13 September-8 October

Weeks 3-6

8 October

Meeting two

15 October

Meeting three

18 October-26 November 

Weeks 8-12 (exam week 25-29 October not included)

26 November

Meeting four

29 November-17 December

Weeks 13-15

The main activities revolve around eight obligatory assignments: a pronunciation profile (PROPRO) - 3 hand-ins, four oral presentations, and 3 written summaries. The idea of each assignment is that they should be supportive of the other assignments and each one should, therefore, be completed before attempting the next one. 

  • Deadlines: it is important that you keep to the deadlines due to the process-oriented nature of the tasks. Any issues with meeting the deadlines, please speak to or email the teacher. 
  • Revisions: should assignment requirements not be met, revisions will be requested.
  • Participation: Active participation in the course and attendance in the meetings are expected. Please speak to or email the teachers if you have schedule issues.

Compliance with Health Regulations

As you know, the first study period comes as vaccinations for Covid have not fully been administered to the entire population. So, we are closely following all health and safety regulations and also have constructed this course to keep your safety in mind. If any major changes must be made to the course as a result, we will post them here.

Our need to prioritize our health and safety has some implications:

  • We must follow all regulations issued by the state or the university. That might mean that we have to convert some (or all) in-person sessions to Zoom sessions instead. 
  • You will need to check your email frequently for any updates to the course. We will always aim to give you sufficient time to adjust to any changes or updates.
  • However, in the case of, e.g. instructor illness, we may sometimes have to make changes closer to the start time of a session than we would like. We ask for your understanding if any such late notices happen.
  • If you experience illness symptoms, it is best to stay away from others on the course. If this transpires and means that you must miss an obligatory session, you will be assigned compensation. This course does not have rooms that have been equipped for hybrid sessions (sessions where some people attend in person while others attend via Zoom), so there is no way for you to remotely attend a session that is in-person. Therefore, we ask that you only miss class when you are ill, and that you use the discussion board to post questions for other students/group members about what you missed when you were ill.

Working with Canvas

For some of you, working in Canvas, the learning management platform in Sweden, might be new, and therefore, I recommend taking a look at the following pages for tips and guidelines:

It is important to be aware that every teacher may utilise the Canvas learning platform differently. The links above provide good guidelines in general. But there may be some deviations. We have created a navigation guide to this course's Canvas pages for you: Navigating FSP055's Canvas pages.

Schedule

It is strongly recommended that you plan ahead using the items of the course in the Canvas Calendar and the pages in the Weekly activities module, not least because there are not many meetings (most tasks and activities are asynchronous). Any details provided in TimeEdit are limited.

Meeting one is on 10 September. Before we meet then though, there are a few tasks to do. Take a look at the page Weeks 1-2 (30 Aug-9 Sept).

Course literature

  • Recommended reading and exercises to be provided during the course.
  • You will find links to important information related to this course and studying at Chalmers here: Important Resources

Changes made since the last occasion

  • Meetings have moved back to campus after the online setup during the pandemic.
  • Have tried to use Canvas more intuitively for the course set up, e.g. creating specific pages of details of scheduled activities and a master list page in order to find specific course content from different sessions/other material more easily.
  • Updates and adjustments to assignment details for more clarity.

Examination form

Assessment

In order to pass the course, all of the eight obligatory assignments mentioned under course design must be completed and passed. Assignments are to be handed in via their specific Canvas submission slots under the section Assignments. You will be notified through Canvas when an assignment is completed. Assessment of assignments is based on the following criteria: General Oral Presentation Assessment Criteria and General Writing Assessment Criteria.