Week 4

This week we finished our previous work on interviews and started the next oral genre: songs. We studied different things regarding songs. Many times songs have a narrative structure with characters and a plot, a series of events that are narrated or described. We also learned that songs have many literary elements such as metaphors and analogies and that in some of the best songs, the musical arrangements and the singing style obeys to the intended meaning and message the song aims at conveying. We saw a good example of this in the some classic rock songs from the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

We also studied a little bit about the history of rock. We learned that rock has evolved from the merge of different genres such as country music and blues. We also learned that, although rock was born in the USA, soon the UK also adopted it and contributed many of the greatest stars of this genre and many of its distinctive features. For those who could not come to class, here's one of the documentaries of the history of rock we watched and one of the songs we worked on:






Next week we will move into advertising as a genre and some of its distinctive features. Particularly on Monday, we will work on the last song that we have in our schedule, discuss some of the elements of the song reviews. We will also have Katie Kingsella as a guest to the class. She will tell you about her experience creating a short video, a video some of you participated in and most are probably familiar with.

See you next week.

Week 3

This week we moved from listening to speaking. We reviewed some points to bear in mind to prepare and deliver and effective oral presentation. First, we read and discussed some general advice on the whole process (planning, practicing, delivering and evaluating). Follow this link to view some of the materials we used in class regarding the whole process.

We also focus on some aspects on the delivery stage. Most tips on effective presentations emphasize: showing a relaxed attitude, establishing a strong link with your audience, controlling gestures, and adjusting your speech to effectively communicate (voice, prosody, pace, etc.) As for the last aspect, I'd like to share with you Julian Treasure's TED talk on how to speak so that people want to listen.




A last important aspects in delivering presentations is the visual aids to use. Again there are plenty of materials giving you tips and pieces of advice on ow to produce effective visual ais. Although ost concentrate on powerpoint, many of the ideas they convey can be equally effective when using other slideware (such as prezi). Here is Death by Powerpoint, one of the most cited resources on creating great visual aids to support oral presentations.


 

Death by PowerPoint from Alexei Kapterev

We closed the week by discussing interviews in the media. Although the classification of interviews is usually based on how structured (planned) the questions are, we came to the conclusion that many other elements may lead to variations. For example, the topic, the interviewee, the show, the potential audience are all elements that influence the levels of formality, orality and naturalness in different interviews on the media. Here's one of the interviews we watched in class:


In a final activity we did about this topic, you were distributed in pairs and small groups and assigned a text on a topic. Your task was to write an interview based on the information on the text (or you could say you had to rewrite that information in the form of an interview). We ran out of time, but on Monday we will be seeing this interviews conducted in class.

Following our calendar, we will close the topic of interviews and news on Monday and we will start with songs on Wednesday (or maybe Monday depending on time).

See you next week.

Week 2

On our second week, we discussed the differences between spoken and written language. Generally, spoken language is ephemeral, fast-paced, spontaneous, redundant, and grammatically less complex. Other characteristics include implicit reference (things that are not told because they are known by both speaker and listener); additive coordination (more use of and, or and incomplete clauses instead of elaborate subordination) and vagueness (stuff like that, you know what I mean, the thing.... etc.). However, these differences are clear when we compared formal writing to everyday conversation.

Spoken texts differ in typologies and genres. While some genres can be described by the above-mentioned characteristics, some others lie at middle point between written and spoken language. For example, a news report on radio and TV is planned, rather than spontaneous. In academic presentation, the speaker might use grammar that is closer to the grammar of a written text. Therefore, the intentions and communicative purposes of texts will determine many of its linguistics features and it is pointless to think of oral and written language in terms of two separate extremes.

The second point we covered in this week was news report, the first of the oral genres in our course. We discussed the typical structure of news reports and the different aims they cover. We practice by watching different reports from different section of different news channels on line. Here is just one example of the reports we watched and discussed in class.

Week 1

This week we started with an introduction to the course. I discussed listening as a cognitive process and discussed the elements that can make ease or interfere comprehension. We took a diagnostic test and then review the resultsin class. Listening involves making meaning from incoming oral language. However, it is not merely an acustic process and neither is it a mere linguistic process. Previous knowledge, expectations and perceptions all influence the way we go about that meaning-making process.

Another aspect we covered was note-taking. As college students you are exposed to lectures, movies, videos and many other oral (spoken) sources of information. Naturally, our memory is limitted and we cannot rely on it completely to keep and retrieve all that information. Therefore, we need some method to register that information in a channel that can be later consulted. Most of us usually take notes, but often those notes are disorganizde and difficult to make sense of. On the other hand, we usually take notes that we rarely go back to. Considering this, we studied some systematic techniques for note-taking. In case you missed that class, or in case you just would like to review, here are two of the videos we watched in class:







You can also search for your own videos and proposals. You will probably be surprised to find there are plenty of videos, tips, methods and techniques for effective note-taking.


Next week we will discuss the differences between written and spoken language and some general scheme to classify oral text typologies. Also, we will start studying the first genre, that is, news reports.