The course is for incoming graduate students who, based on their score on our listening placement test and an interview, we decide are in need of concentrated practice and study in academic listening. Non-academic listening is only very briefly addressed. This 10 week, credit/no-credit course is only taught in the fall quarter and typically has 8-14 students per section. Most, but not all, students are engineering students, and the majority are Chinese and Korean speakers. The class meets for two 75 minute sessions each week in a classroom with a whiteboard, a vga connection to a projector or TV, and a VCR/DVD player. I have taught this course once before, but have taught the next course in the listening series many times.
In general, listening content was introduced to facilitate a bottom-up approach: from words to overall comprehension. This approach was taken because of the usual skill set of foreign graduate students at Stanford, who typically have much familiarity with text than speech. The task, then, is to facilitate a connection between words, phrases and sentences in a text mode, where they have a considerable passive vocabulary and are comfortable extracting complex information, to an aural mode.
The curriculum is mainly based on five principles:
The syllabus was available both on CourseWork and on the Stanford Syllabus site: http://syllabus.stanford.edu
Class meetings began with one of several regular "corners" and proceeded to the main lesson content. The "corners" allowed students to prepare for certain discussions or formative assessments, while lessons introduced methodology for listening which was then re-enforced with homework assignments.
Following the format of the rest of the course, assignments moved from bottom up: words to overall comprehension. The format moved from fill in the blanks in sentences to paragraphs, then into comprehension questions. All homework used clips of real lectures.
Several resources were uploaded into the Materials tool of CourseWork. These included:
An alternative listing of the course content, by CourseWork tool.
Ken Romeo, Ph.D.
Academic Technology Specialist
Stanford Language Center
Academic Computing
Meyer Library 280A