Aims

Oral and listening skills in a specialised context (business).

Main themes

Main themes:
In the language laboratory, the students work on a video method (9 episodes) dealing with a merger, which leads to a number of themes such as the relationships within a company, meetings, negotiations, cultural differences aso.
Students also work on another set of video documents, each of which deals with a specific theme related to the business world, such as "globalisation", "leadership" aso.
Moreover, a number of themes such as the different functions within a company, the setting up of a company, banking, import/export, advertising, the environment (and sustainable development) aso are dealt with in the classroom (not in the laboratory).

Methods
On the one side the student is encouraged to gradually improve his/her listening comprehension skills with videos and audio cassettes (monologues, dialogs, formal and familiar registers, different accents, specialised contexts such as business, economics, politics¿). On the other side, the course aims to improve oral production skills (pronunciation, accentuation, intonation, specialised expressions¿) with various oral exercises partly taking place in a language laboratory, with lexical extension and with the revision of the main grammar structures. Detailed correction by the teacher.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Workload:
a 60-hour-course taught for two hours a week during the whole year

Teacher:
Falin-Schrijvers Lutgarde

Target group:
Master in multilingual business communication (MULT 2 MS)

Language: English

Requirements:
Intermediate to advanced level, i.e. B1 to B2 level of the "Common European Framework for languages".

Assessment:
The exam includes a written part (listening comprehension, vocabulary and grammar) and an oral part (a pronunciation subpart and an interactive communication subpart).

Course materials:
The course materials include a set of course notes (listening comprehension and pronunciation material), a book (texts, vocabulary, grammar, interactive communication) and the ILV cd- rom (pronunciation files and multitest exercises containing business vocabulary)

The content of the classroom exercises has been developed in cooperation with the teacher of the GERM 2422 course ("Oral communication strategies in the company") in order to make sure that the two courses are complementary.
At least one part of the exercises should refer to the subjects treated in the GERM "Reading comprehension and lexical extension" course to make sure that the students are able to pronounce the specialised terminology covered in this course.

Other credits in programs