FOUNDATION SCHOOL

Can-do Statements B1

Course Description

Course Goal

The course aims at helping learners to achieve an overall English language proficiency leading to beginner Independent User of language defined as low B1 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), developing conversational skills, expressing ideas, and helping learners deal with problems and situations where they meet unpredictable language.

Course Objectives

The course is intended to accomplish its goal in one full academic semester of fourteen weeks through developing students’ language skills to:

1. Read and understand the main ideas of a variety of texts*. (READING)
2. Understand the main points and straightforward factual details on a range of familiar matters given in clear and relatively slow speech. (LISTENING COMPREHENSION)
3. Have conversations, express personal opinions and exchange information on familiar topics. (SPEAKING).
4. Produce short connected texts divided into paragraphs on familiar topics using appropriate vocabulary in an adequately developed response. (WRITING)
5. Demonstrate control of a limited range of vocabulary and grammatical structures with minor inconsistencies. (USE OF ENGLISH)

* Medium-length texts of 250-500 words in frequently used grammatical structures at this level.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are descriptions of what students will know or be able to do with the language as a result of instruction. A student learning outcome is written in terms of observable and measurable language skills. The table below lists the SLOs according to their Macro skills.

 Speaking

• Can reasonably fluently relate a straightforward narrative or description as a linear sequence of events.
• Can communicate orally with some confidence on routine matters associated with priorities, alternatives, needs, and precise quantities needed. (e.g. decision on what and how much to buy to cook a meal or give a party).
• Can list the positive and negative aspects of familiar places and briefly give opinions on these places with relative ease. 
• Can handle transactions in familiar places making requests for services and information and explaining in some detail what he/she needs.
• Can ask about and express his/her and other people’s hopes, ambitions, intentions, plans and decisions.
• Can describe and ask about experiences with relative ease, expressing feelings and reactions.
• Can describe and compare people, places, and things using a range of adjectives.
• Can express and respond to opinions on familiar topics using synonyms and antonyms of familiar words to avoid repetition.
• Can ask for and give detailed directions to places.
• Can express degrees of obligation when describing one’s own and others’ responsibilities and commitments.
• Can give advice and make suggestions on everyday problems using a range of common expressions.
• Can effectively convey the main points in a process, using passive or active verb forms to get across which points are most important to focus on.
• Can talk about future possibilities and consequences of particular actions and events.

 Listening

• Can make predictions about a story and listen to check if they are correct.
• Can follow changes in the topic of an extended, slowly- and clearly-conducted conversation about everyday situations. (e.g. health, work, an accident)
• Can listen to extended conversations and interviews and understand straightforward factual information about everyday topics, identifying both general messages and specific details.
• Can listen to short recorded passages and infer what is meant or referred to from contextual detail.

Reading

• Can read to find out and pass on factual detail from a medium-length text**.
• Can read a medium-length general interest article, locate new vocabulary items, and deduce their meaning from the context.
• Can read a medium length article for gist and respond to the text with his/her own opinions / reactions.
• Can scan longer texts in order to locate desired information as well as gather information from different parts of a text, or from different texts in order to fulfill a specific task.
• Can make predictions about the content of a story or an article and read to check if they are correct.
• Can preview a medium length article using title, headings, introductory paragraph and visual support to identify topic, main idea and general organization.

Writing

• Can write a narrative account of past experiences or events, in a coherent and cohesive text of up to 3 paragraphs.
• Can give the background to events then describe the main events, appropriately using past simple and past continuous.
• Can join discrete elements in a story into a linear sequence of points using time expressions such as in the morning, last June, at 7 o’clock and time clauses featuring First, next, then, after that, during, while, before, after and when.
• Can plan writing by asking and answering questions about a topic and putting ideas into an outline.
• Can draft each paragraph of the narrative essay in stages, following an outline.
• Can revise writing by understanding and implementing peer and instructor feedback, by identifying irrelevant sentences, and by proofreading for mistakes with past tense verb forms.

Vocabulary and Grammar

• Can demonstrate good control of definite and indefinite articles in their writing.
• Can understand, say, and write high frequency compound nouns and verb-noun collocations (with the verbs have, go, come, take, get, do, make).
• Can use adverbs such as still, only, of course, just, at last, exactly, fortunately and unfortunately and especially in simple sentences.
• Can understand and appropriately use the most frequent combinations of verbs, infinitives and/or gerunds such as like swimming, like to swim, and want to go