About

The Origin of This Site

We created this site to share the lesson plans and other materials that we use in this Listening/Speaking Level F class with other ESL teachers -- click around and use what works for you! This is a 10-week course at LCC, but you can pick and choose from the 8 chapters for a shorter or longer term. The chapters can be covered in any order.

Lane Community College's Intensive English Language Program offers 6 levels (A=beginner, F=college transition). This site was designed for Listening/Speaking Level F, which is a class that teaches listening and note-taking strategies focused especially on lecture listening, as well as presentation, pronunciation, conversation, and academic discussion skills.

LCC ESL Students in Level F take three separate intensive classes (Writing, Listening/Speaking, and Reading for a total of 20 in-class contact hours per week). Prior to the re-imagining of this class and the creation of this site, each Level F class had a different textbook with different thematic progressions. Students experienced cognitive overload with the demand to learn the vocabulary, concepts, and skills of the three separate classes. In addition, students in our department are often from marginalized backgrounds and can find it financially difficult to purchase the three separate textbooks.

In order to lessen students' financial and cognitive burdens and create more connections between the three classes, we used the topics from the Reading textbook (Academic Encounters Level 4: Reading and Writing, 2nd edition, Cambridge 2014) to find freely-available authentic videos or recorded audio for the Listening/Speaking class.

Over the past year, students have expressed appreciation for the reduced cost of taking the course. In addition, they have shown increased interest and engagement in the course due to the authentic, real-life materials and complementary nature of the three Level F classes.

How to Use This Site

A Site for Teachers

  • The intent of this site is to share the lesson plans and other materials used in our Listening/Speaking Level F class with other ESL teachers.
  • If you want students to have access to these videos outside of class, you can open the videos and copy the links into your own LMS (Moodle, Canvas, etc.). We do not recommend sharing the link to this site with students, as it has all of the lesson plans and a few small assessments included.
  • The class topics for Listening/Speaking F come from the chapters in the textbook used in Reading Level F (Academic Encounters Level 4: Reading and Writing, 2nd edition, Cambridge 2014).
  • While we teach this class in conjunction with Reading Level F here at LCC, this Listening/Speaking class can also function as a standalone class: the Reading class textbook is not a necessary component of Listening/Speaking Level F. We kept the chapter names and chapter order from that textbook (e.g., Chapter 1: Stress), but the class topics can be taught in any order, with or without the textbook.
  • In general, this class is designed around watching freely-available, authentic videos in class and doing various in-class exercises around the videos. The students in Listening/Speaking F also do in-class presentations, out-of-class interview projects, and various other in-class activities, including a focus on pronunciation.
  • We strongly suggest teaching listening & note-taking strategies and reinforcing them throughout the term.
  • The outcomes for LCC's Listening/Speaking Level F class are here.

Google Sites

  • You do not need a Google account to view the lesson plans.
  • If you want to edit any lesson plan, you will need to either download the plans as Word documents, or else use a Google account to make copies of each Google Doc and store them in our Google Drive.

Copyright & Open-Source Materials

  • All of the lesson plans on this site may be copied, downloaded, shared, and adapted. Most of the videos linked here are under copyright; please respect the copyright owners' rights and do not download these videos. Instead, please provide links to the videos & transcripts in their original form.