Welcome

Advanced Speaking and Critical Listening Skills (21G.232/3) is designed for bilingual students who are relatively comfortable with the complex grammatical structures and vocabulary of English conversation. We will focus on the more formal types of speaking that are central to academic and professional communication in global English. The course is in workshop format, which means that most of our time together will be spend in activities based on preparation (readings, videos, exercises) that you do in advance outside of class time.

What will we work on?

You will receive instruction, practice and feedback—all grounded in current research--in four main areas:

The interactions, including impromptu speaking, job interviews, research presentations, and interactive teaching, for which MIT students/graduates will be responsible in their careers;
The formulaic vocabulary (gambits) associated with professional communication;
The essential pronunciation, stress and intonation patterns for comprehensibility in global English (a listener’s perception of how much effort s/he makes to listen to a speaker) and intelligibility (the extent to which a speaker’s message is understood by a listener);
Critical listening skills for professional contexts, including signaling attentiveness, respect, and confidence, as well as interpreting others’ nonverbal language.

Over the course of the term, you will learn a great deal about yourself as a communicator and as an active listener. You will be responsible for a variety of speaking and listening tasks. We will be considering such topics as effective audience analysis, message structure, gestures and facial expressions, common rhetorical expressions associated with particular contexts, successful Q & A sessions, purposeful visual aids, vocal delivery features, and interpretation of rapid speech. We will also consider the influence of national- and micro-cultures on communication norms.

You will frequently speak about your discipline and research interests in different contexts. This practice will help you develop flexibility in tone and accuracy in expression whether you are speaking impromptu or extemporaneously.

In addition, everyone will practice the critical skill of communicating constructive feedback. You are expected to evaluate each of your major recorded speaking tasks and consider the feedback of your peers as well as the detailed assessments that I will provide you when you hand in each of your self-evaluations. As an active listener in 21G.232/3, you will learn to identify key features of clear, audience-friendly communication; to adapt these features for your own use; and to avoid problems that interfere with communication.

You will also learn how to handle nerves; speak with confidence and honor time constraints; sharpen your active listening skills; minimize your audience’s listening efforts; contribute constructively to group decision-making; integrate verbal and nonverbal language to support a particular message; assess your communication performance, as well as those of your peers; and give and receive honest, realistic and focused feedback in different registers.

Course Syllabus Go to the Syllabus page to see the syllabus as as well as the course schedules.

Modules: This is your course content. Go to Modules to see what we're doing in class on any given day.