At the end of the 1st year Oral Communication Skills course you have acquired a proficiency in listening and speaking that is at least equivalent to level B2+/C1 of the CEFR. This means that you can:

• understand standard spoken language, live or broadcast, on both familiar and unfamiliar topics normally encountered in social, professional or academic life and identify speaker viewpoints and attitudes as well as the information content;
• follow lectures, talks and reports and other forms of academic/professional presentation which are propositionally and linguistically complex;
• use the language fluently, accurately and effectively, with few significant vocabulary errors, on a wide range of general topics, marking clearly the relationships between ideas;
• communicate spontaneously with good grammatical control without much sign of having to restrict what they want to say;
• give clear, systematically developed descriptions and presentations, with appropriate highlighting of significant points, and relevant supporting detail;
• and have a clear, natural, pronunciation and intonation without or with a minimum of L1 interference.

Oral Communication Skills is a course dedicated to language acquisition, intended to help you attain a native-like proficiency in English. The course runs for an entire year (OCS-A in semester 1 and OCS-B in semester 2), and includes two components, oral communication and pronunciation, which are taught separately.

OCS seminars focus on speaking proficiency (complexity, accuracy, fluency), listening comprehension, and presentation skills. During the course, you practise speaking English and listening to English by means of class activities and assignments, such as participating in debates and informal discussions, giving presentations, assessing your fellow students' presentations, and evaluating your own proficiency. The language and culture of Britain are taken as a starting point for many of the assignments. To improve your general proficiency, you will also work on vocabulary and grammar. You will build your vocabulary by studying an idioms book and by keeping a Personal Idiom File (PIF). In addition, you will work on grammar exercises in the online Brightspace environment.

The pronunciation component is taught in separate tutorials. You practise your pronunciation independently by means of self-study, using audio samples of a model speaker that can be found on the website accompanying the textbook (https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138886346/default.php). The weekly tutorials are meant to determine whether you have adequately learned those aspects of the pronunciation dealt with in the exercises and to help you to improve.

Note that English is the working language of this course. This means that in class you are expected to speak English at all times, both to your teacher and your peers.