This two-volume Campus Talk set delivers a wide range of skills and strategies which students can actively apply in everyday social communication in both academic and non-academic environments on campus. It encourages an 'interactional' rather than a 'speaker focused' language development approach. Drawing on corpus data, it exposes students to the most salient and widely used vocabulary and grammar, illustrates the most effective conversation maintenance and communication strategies and draws attention to the socio-cultural aspects of communication.
Campus Talk comprises two textbooks. Each textbook contains four instructional units and each unit is based on situations and conversations that students will come across in their everyday lives on campus.
Part 1, comprising units 1-4 covers areas such as striking up a conversation, sharing and responding to news, making small talk, managing group communication, expressing and reacting to opinions, expressing, responding and talking about feelings and making and responding to requests. Each unit includes:
- Enabling, input-based and interactional tasks and activities
- Usage-informed vocabulary list
- Main production task
- Self-assessment
With a variety of challenging tasks and activities and plenty of opportunities to practice and engage in self-reflection and self-assessment, students using these books will grow their confidence and enhance their abilities to express themselves clearly, appropriately and effectively. The workbooks are aimed at upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English (CEFR B1-C2) to promote interactional language awareness and develop active listening skills.
About the Author: Silvana Dushku works as a Senior Language Education Strategist. She was Director of the Community Language Program, TESOL Certificate Program, and Language Program Management Certificate Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has taught EFL/ESL for over 35 years, and has been involved in language program development, curriculum and materials design, and teacher training in Europe and the USA. Her interests include teaching and researching vocabulary and spoken English, and applications of corpus linguistics and technology in ELT.
Paul Thompson is a Reader in Applied Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He has twenty years of EFL/EAP teaching experience in Japan and the UK, and has worked in higher education since 1983. His interests are in both written and spoken language in academic contexts, in the linguistic aspects of human-computer interaction, and in uses of educational technologies in language learning.