Course Description

An additional third hour of language tuition per week is intended to prepare students for study abroad. Attendance at this extra hour and completion of any preparation work allocated will be essential to achieve the proficiency required for a stay abroad beyond the scope of the general language class.

These sessions will help you to become familiar with university life and culture in the foreign country and will support your language studies through the extra face to face interaction in the foreign language they provide. You may also expect to work with scientific and technical terminology in the foreign language at a suitable level. Your teacher will introduce a variety of topics and activities to develop a whole range of skills. At the start of term youwill be provided with a general introduction to the topics and areas of practice that you will find in these classes, but you may expect the focus of each level to be as follows:

Focus

This level focuses on communicative aspects (listening, speaking, and presenting topics in the foreign language) and on practical cultural matters. Working with audiovisual materials, students will practice skills such as note-taking, summarizing and identifying essential detail from lectures. An introduction to the specific cities students may visit on their year abroad will also be provided as a complement of the cultural component of the general language class. New scientific and technical vocabulary will be introduced either through texts, translation, listening exercises and the scientific-technical presentations which will take place during the second term.

Assessment

• A 15-20 minute in-class presentation supported by either a poster or other presentation aids and followed by questions 
• This presentation counts towards the oral examination grade of the general Horizons language module (15%)