INTENSIVE LISTENING

Before Listening Activities

Activity I: Orientation

6. Going away to college can be an overwhelming time for new students as they embark on a new stage in their lives. What are freshmen usually anxious and nervous about? Make a list of the most common fears that freshmen have at the beginning of the first year of college.

7. What was your transition from secondary school to university like? Did you have any worries and fears?

Activity II: Helpful Vocabulary

1. Match the idioms and phrasal verbs with their definitions, then give their Russian equivalents.

2. Use the words from exercise 1 in the correct form in the following sentences.

1. She is new to the company and needs time _______________.

2. He is not the problem solving CEO that he _______________.

3. Near the end of the school year, Sally began _________, and her grades showed it.

4. It’s really exciting ___________ for the first time even if I am only one state away from my family. I’ve never felt so independent before.

5. He hasn’t shown any signs of grief over his father’s death, but I’m sure he _____ just __________.

6. The math skills of the majority of children in this school _________ to the national standards.

7. Living away from home while attending college gives students a lot of new-found freedom – often resulting in a classic case of classes __________ and GPAs destroyed.

8. Although _________ is something that is normal for most young adults, the age at which a person does this often depends on the emotional and financial readiness of the young adult, as well as on the parents and the child’s relationship with those parents.

9. On this website you can see how our current students and graduates ____________ around the world, hear from scholarship winners and see our TV stars.

10. The survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, found that China was the only one of 21 countries or territories where the majority believes parents ______ too much __________ students to do well in school.

Listening Comprehension Activities

1. Listen to Reba Watkins, a freshman at Howard University, Washington, D.C., talking about getting adapted to college life, and write true (T) or false (F) in front of each sentence.

1. Howard University is far away from Reba’s home.

2. Reba feels excited about becoming independent and being on her own, free from rules and chores.

3. Reba did not do well at school as she often skipped her classes and slacked off on many assignments.

4. Reba had been looking forward to moving out of her parents’ home since the first day of her senior year in high school.

5. Reba is starting to doubt if going to college was a good decision.

6. Reba feels pressured because everyone around her expects her to make her mark in the world.

2. Listen again and tick the freshman fears Reba has.

Reba is afraid that

· she will not have enough money to do all the things she wants to do.

· she will not come up to her parents’ expectations.

· she will not be able to manage her time properly.

· she will not be able to help her parents to pay for college.

· she will have trouble getting along with her roommate.

· studying will be too difficult as she is probably not as smart as other freshmen.

· she will have difficulty finding a major she likes.

· she will become homesick, and this will affect her grades.

After Listening Activities

Activity I: Discussing the Issues

1. Why do freshmen often feel worried about going away to college? What advice would you give to such first-year students?

2. Read the following excerpt from the article “Start of college can be harder on parents than freshmen”. Do you agree with Ian Sladen’s opinion that start of college is probably tougher for parents than for students? How did your parents feel about your going away to college?

Increasingly, colleges and universities have noted the support parents need in letting go, so much that they are starting to formalize the goodbye. At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, incoming freshmen are shown a video with their smiling, crying parents waving goodbye as one big group. First-year students at the University of Chicago, meanwhile, walk their parents to the university gate as bagpipes play in what some university staff call the “parting of the seas.” At Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in Philadelphia, a goodbye reception includes an unofficial “crying room,” set up with tissues and a counselor. It’s kind of a gentle joke, but one that’s meant to send a message. “The idea was that we understand this is a major change for everybody,” says Ian Sladen, LeBow’s assistant dean of undergraduate programs. “It’s just as tough for parents – probably tougher, really.” But in the end, the message from universities and colleges is the same: Parents, please go home

(http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-09-05-freshman-coping-parents_N.htm).

CULTURE CORNER

Getting an Insight into American Culture

Gap year

A gap year is a period of time when students take a break from formal education to travel, volunteer, study, intern, or work. A gap year is also referred to as a deferred year, year out, year off, time out, time off. A gap year experience can last for several weeks, a semester, or up to a year or more. Typically a gap year is taken between high school graduation and starting college, during college, or between college and starting graduate school or a career.

Read the stories below and say whose experience appeals to you most. Why?

Matt: I spent a gap year volunteering at a hospital in rural Zimbabwe and came away forever changed. At first I was as homesick as can be, but was in too remote a place to change my mind. The experiences I had could fill a book, from medical experience I gained at the hospital to the cultural experience of living with a Zimbabwean family, to the personal learning experience of being the only non-Zimbabwean for many, many miles around.

Katherine: Taking a gap year has hands down been the best decision that I’ve ever made. At the age of 18, I’m currently living in my own apartment rent free in Paris, just a ten minutes walk from the Notre Dame. How many of my contemporaries from home can say that they’ve done something like that? I’m an au pair, doing babysitting for a Parisian family in exchange for an apartment and pocket money, what I’ve found to be the cheapest way to live in Europe. My experiences thus far have been invaluable – I’ve gotten to travel in my free time, to Italy and England, and made friends who I know will continue to be so for the rest of my life. I’ve also gained a new outlook on different paths that one can take to higher education; instead of going to the small school back home in North Carolina that I deferred from, I’ll be going to St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, something that I would have never even looked into if it had not been for meeting so many international people here who urged me to look for college options that were a bit outside of the box.

Tamara J. Erickson: Our daughter took a year off, a gap year, between high school and college. She spent most of the year doing physically difficult, menial labor on horse farms in South Carolina, as well as riding, competing, and just generally learning how live on her own – dealing with irrational bosses, negotiating with landlords and truck repairmen, and finding how many ways she could stretch a box of pasta into a week’s meals. She also backpacked solo around Europe for a month, leveraging her Euro-rail pass into visits to as many art museums as time would allow, and spent another month on a NOLs program, kayaking in Alaska. Although the choice of activities was uniquely hers, the experience itself is one that I highly recommend to any graduate. Just living in the world, doing manual labor, figuring how to make ends meet, gave her a calm confidence that is palpably different from many of her current college cohorts who raced from high pressured high school classes into the intense college setting.

Rachel: I spent a year volunteering and studying in Israel through Masa Israel’s Young Judaea Year Course. While living in Bat Yam, a periphery city right outside of Tel Aviv, I worked in a local public school, tutoring kids in English. I also spent some time volunteering in an orphanage in southern Israel. I saw all of Israel, hiking the Sea-to-Sea Israel Trail, and trekking through Israel’s history and beauty. My Hebrew improved immensely and I made lifelong connections with my American peers and Israeli neighbors.

Gregory: I wanted to see how the other half lived, to learn the things that weren’t found in books, to live a phantasmagoria of unforgettable experiences.So I went to China. So far, I’ve rock-climbed above Buddhist grottoes, showered in underground waterfalls, squeaked my way across 13th-century temples hanging halfway up cliffs, and stayed in earthquake-ravaged villages where everyone still dwells in tents. In a one-street town whose sole cabdriver appeared to be blind, I went deep inside one of the world’s most dazzling monasteries to party with monks (the scene was about as bangin’ as what you’d expect from a group of pacifists). I’ve motorcycled across a frozen holy lake in the Himalayas, and I’ve stared into giant volcano pits on the North Korean border (learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/what-would-you-do-with-a-gap-year/).

Activity I: Discussing the Issues

1. What do you think a gap year is: a legitimate way to learn and grow or excuse to avoid work and school?

2. Could a gap year be, in some ways, even more valuable than a year of college?

3. If you had the chance to take a gap year, would you do it? Why/Why not?

4. If you took a gap year, how would you spend it? Would you travel, volunteer, work? Would your parents support or oppose your decision to take a gap year?

ACTIVE LISTENING

Before Listening Activities

Activity I: Orientation

1. Researchers at the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce used new Census numbers to show links between specific college majors and long-term wages. Look at the table below, which includes 10 top best and 10 worst paid college majors, and say what conclusions you can draw from the data.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 968