Unit 1: Being an Efficient Distance Learner

study skills – managing your time efficiently – organising your schedule – note-taking – overcoming the loneliness of the distance learner – how this course works.

Unit 2: Semantics/Language Awareness

Module 1 – form and function – lexical meaning: denotation, connotation, synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, polysemes, homonyms – the importance of collocation – time and tense – presents – past tenses – futurity – conditionals and hypothetical meaning
Module 2 – progressive and perfect aspects: form and meaning – the progressive aspect and stative verbs – form and meaning of the perfect aspect – sentence structure: units of language; sentence elements
Module 3 – negatives: types of negation – questions: question types – modality – word classes and phrases – adjectives and adverbs – determiners
Module 4 – prepositions and multi-word verbs – word formation: morphemes

Unit 3: Phonology and Phonetics

Module 1 – attitudes to pronunciation teaching – terminology in phonology and phonetics – organs of speech – phonemes – the phonemic chart – consonants: description and practical applications – vowels – cardinal vowels chart – diphthongs – place of articulation – research based project – materials evaluation
Module 2 – the syllable – consonant clusters – strong and weak syllables – word and sentence stress – the ‘schwa’ sound – marking stress – primary and secondary stress – tendencies in word stress – research based project – weak forms – English as a time-stressed language – Features of connected speech – Materials evaluation
Module 3 – spoken and written forms – intonation – tone units – the tonic syllable – pitch movement – intonation and discourse – teaching and learning intonation – research based project – pronunciation and ‘which’ English – are native speakers the best ESOL teachers? – Strategies for personal development in the teaching of pronunciation

Unit 4: Psycholinguistics

Module 1 – attitudes toward language teaching – good language learners: characteristics and strategies – the teacher’s influence on learner strategies – cognitive strategies – metacognitive strategies – communication strategies – social strategies – learner training – learner training materials evaluation – research based project – observation task
Module 2 – motivation – motivational factors – the teacher’s influence – motivational differences – learner styles – Multiple Intelligence Theory – research based project
Module 3 – first language acquisition: behaviourism, innatism, interactionism – second language acquisition: behaviourism, innatism (aka cognitivism), information processing, interactionism.

Unit 5: Discourse Analysis

Module 1 – brief history of Discourse Analysis: structuralism, sociolinguistics, post-modernist – coherence in language – cognitive interpretation of language: Schema Theory – social context of language – political context of language – approaches to encourage coherence in discourse (practical case) – discourse communicative methodology and student centredness
Module 2 – teacher talk in the ESOL class – turn-taking research – text structure: cohesive devices (lexical cohesion, tense concordance, pronoun referencing, article referencing, conjunctions, ellipsis, substitution, parallelism) – cohesive devices in the classroom: a practical case – differences between written and spoken language – discourse intonation – teaching discourse intonation in the ESOL classroom – transcribing spoken language

Unit 6: Syllabus Design

Module 1 – pros and cons of a syllabus – types of syllabus – needs analysis – planning the syllabus – action research project

Unit 7: Materials Design and Exploitation

Module 1 – evaluating course books – exploiting published materials – resources and technology – using the internet – adapting authentic materials – action research project

Unit 8: Methodology

Module 1 – Second Language Acquisition Theory – behaviourism versus cognitivism – the natural approach – the lexical approach – more recent approaches and views on the teaching-learning relationship

Unit 9: Teacher Development

Module 1 – factors that contribute to teacher demotivation – a basis for professional progress – peer training – sources of valuable feedback – meetings as a forum for sharing reflections and further development – practical ideas for moving forward as a teacher: practical case

Unit 10: English as a World Language

Module 1 – English as an international language – English in the country you wish to teach and research project – standard English and varieties of English – teaching language and culture – teaching in monolingual and multilingual classes – implications for teaching: practical cases