A One-Semester Elective Class, Designed and Taught at a Tech University

Responding to students’ wish lists of skills and competencies as expressed in oral English class surveys, I created a class designed to improve students’ applied oral and written English through collaborative problem solving, team-building exercises, and situational tasks. Activities were designed to broaden students’ functional repertoire of business collocations through exposure to current industry assessments, standards, and case studies. The class design offered many opportunities for students to take up group leadership roles, gain practical experience in group dynamics, and learn effective strategies for collaborative problem solving in a multilingual context. Throughout, the focus was (and remains, in more recent versions), on communication for meaningful decision-making.

The class ended up fully enrolled, with excellent student and faculty evaluations.

Note: This is the original class record, a reference document reflecting the content as taught in the 2014-2015 academic year. It does not reflect subsequent updates to the model syllabus, which continues to evolve.