PASSWORD: EFFECTIVE_COMMUNICATION COURSE PLAN

This nine-book course consists of three stages: Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced. The course was designed with two main objectives in mind:

a) to prepare students for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL®), the most widely recognized international test that evaluates nonnative speakers' level of competence in English, and

b) to facilitate students' understanding of the spoken English of modern American media, principally TV, and enable them to use its expressions and speech patterns. In this way, students develop the ability to communicate naturally and effectively in current American English.

The main sources used in the selection of the basic vocabulary of the course were:

a) Paul Nation's adaptation of the classic high-frequency word list known as the General Service List (GSL) containing the 2284 most commonly used words in the English language, and

b) the Academic Word List (AWL), consisting of 570 words selected because of the frequency with which they appear in a broad range of academic texts.

The following table* illustrates the importance of these words for the understanding of various types of speech and writing.


WORDS
CONVERSATION%
FICTION%
NEWSPAPERS%
ACADEMIC TEXTS %
First 1000 84.3 82.3 75.6 73.5
1001 to 2000 6.0 5.1 4.7 4.6
AWL 1.9 1.7 3.9 8.5
  92.2 89.1 84.2 86.6

* This table is an adaptation of Table 1.7 in I. S. P. Nation, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 17.


In order to accomplish its second main objective, CCLS also made use of its own list of 5461 words and expressions when choosing the vocabulary used in Password: Effective_Communication (PEC). This list was extracted from CCLS's extensive corpus of approximately 5000 minutes of transcriptions of current American sitcoms. During the course students will learn over 1350 of the most useful words and expressions on this list.

Clearly, mastery of the vocabulary presented in Password: Effective_Communication will guarantee the learner an exceptional level of communicative competence in both general and academic English.

It should be pointed out that, at all levels of the course, the vocabulary presented is accompanied by the grammatical structures essential for communication. All of the material is presented in a dynamic, engaging way that respects the cultural aspect of the English language and ensures that the students' experience is a pleasant and enjoyable one.

Each level of the Advanced Stage consists of a Textbook, a CALL Workbook and a special Listening Comprehension Practice book, material designed to develop students' competence in the four basic language skills.


BOOK 8

Password: Effective_Communication – Advanced Stage – Book 8 is designed for teenagers and young adults who have already attained intermediate-level proficiency in English.

In Book 8, some lessons contain a number of dynamically presented real-life situational dialogues. Real-life dialogues are also present in Lesson 4, which contains a cartoon of an American family going on a camping trip. Lesson 3 is based on an article which appeared in the newsmagazine Newsweek; the article talks about how to make money when the economy is failing. In Lesson 9, a humorous text written by one of our staff writers deals with the difficulties teenagers face in their everyday lives. The objective of both Lessons 3 and 9 is to improve students' reading skills and to encourage them to read for information and for pleasure. During both lessons, students will be encouraged to consult an English monolingual dictionary to look up words and expressions they may not be familiar with. Lesson 8 presents a promotional video which features the attractions of New Hampshire in the winter. The scripts of the video clips shown in class for Lessons 4 and 8 appear in the students' CALL Workbook in a section called The Video Clip. In this section, students will listen to the clips and fill in missing words or sentences in the scripts.

All of the above-mentioned material has been selected to familiarize students with the carefully chosen high-frequency vocabulary on the word frequency lists already mentioned. This is the vocabulary students need to know in order to be able to communicate effectively in English. Both the formal and everyday American speech introduced in the material serve as the basis for all subsequent classroom work.

This book contains the following sections:

At the end of this book, there is a list of all the new words and expressions presented in the situational dialogues, the video clips, and the articles as well as a list containing all the verbs learned since the beginning of the Elementary Stage in their infinitive, past, and past participle forms.

Password: Effective_Communication – Advanced Stage – Book 8 contains 644 new words.