Advanced Media English Listening and SpeakingUnit 1 School lifeBy Xiaoyang QiThere are six clips in this Unit, all about School life.Time Allotment:2 periods=2 classes per week, each unit will spent 2 weeks.Learning objectivesOn completion of this unit, students should be able to :●Approve the listening ability;●Learn to find out the key points during listening clips, such as the figures.●Learn the discussion ability which relates the topics;●Improve the team work ability;●Understand and talk about school life.Teaching Content:●Listen the healthy eating in school, and discuss about issues which relatesto the meal, environment and service of school cafeteria.●Listen to the grants for school buildings, and let students do the discussionof where can get grants for its campus refurbishment.●Listen to the clip three of the increasing tuition fee. Let students discussthe issue of the increasing higher education tuition fee.●Listen to the clip four of the Graduates facing difficult time. Let studentsdiscuss the job market in China nowadays.●Listen to the clip five of Value of a degree, and discuss the the benefits thata good educational background can bring to people.●Listen to the clip six of school disciplines, and discuss the importance ofschool disciplines and how to strengthen school disciplines.Teaching ProcedureClip 1:1. Lead-inTeaching tipsa. Ask students to work in pairs or in groups, discuss these questions andthen share their answers with the whole class.b. It is nor necessary for every student to discuss all the questions, so theteacher may assign one or two questions to each pair or group.c. The teacher may walk around the classroom and provide assistance whenneeded.Questionsa. Do you often eat at the school cafeteria?b. How do you think of the food there?2. Listening skillsWord Tipsa. an array of 一组，一群Script of Healthy Eating in SchoolWomen 1: The schools are doing it because they’ve got to promote healthy eating and I think it’s the right message. But I think really they should target the parents beforehand, because I think it’s quite sad for the children to have things in there and then to take them away.Women 2: I think it is a good idea. I think children should eat healthy while they’re at school. Treats should be weekends or after school.Man 1: So what is allowed in children’s lunch bag? Well, I have an array of food. Good and bad.Man 2: Sandwiches, pasta, fruit and nuts are fine. Sweets, crisps, fizzy drinks and chocolate though are set to be taken away.Clip 2:1. Lead-inTeaching tipsa. Ask students to work in pairs or in groups, discuss these questions andthen share their answers with the whole class.b. It is nor necessary for every student to discuss all the questions, so theteacher may assign one or two questions to each pair or group.c. The teacher may walk around the classroom and provide assistance whenneeded.Questionsa. Where do you think schools can get grants for its campus refurbishment?2. Listening skillsWord TipsRefurbishment n. 整修Commit v. 调配...供使用，拨出Muffle v. 包裹，裹住Forensic adj. 法庭的，法医的Forensic science 法医学Script of Grants for School BuildingsVoice-over: The building work continues but for how much longer? They’re ready to start a second phase of refurbishment here, but the college may have to send the builders home.Women 1: We’ve just come up onto the roof of the old building and as you can see across there, that is the new building we’ve been working on for two years and we’re just about to move into the refurbishment of this great two-lifted building.Voice-over: The principal of South Thames College told me what wouldhappen is she doesn’t get the money for the new building project.Women 1: I will have already committed six and a half to eight million pounds that will then be the college’s debt. And this building would no longer work because the services would be cut off and this will have to be muffled.Voice-over: From hair dressing to forensic science-- over 20,000 students and adult learners come here. Some classes are in the old listed building. But the basement floods and the heating breaks down and that’s why they wanted to give it a refurb.Clip 3:1. Lead-inTeaching tipsa. Ask students to work in pairs or in groups, discuss these questions andthen share their answers with the whole class.b. It is nor necessary for every student to discuss all the questions, so theteacher may assign one or two questions to each pair or group.c. The teacher may walk around the classroom and provide assistance whenneeded.QuestionsThe tuition for higher education is increasing year by year at home and abroad. As a college student, how do you think of the issue? If you come from a poor family, how would you cover the increasing tuition? Give some examples to illustrate idea.2. Listening skillsWord TipsPut sb. off 使扫兴Breathtakingly adv. 让人吃惊地Chancellor n. <英> 大学名誉校长Recession n. (经济的)衰退；衰退期Ivory tower 象牙塔（指脱离实际生活的文学家或艺术家的小天地）Reckless adj. 不计后果的Controversial adj. 有争议的Script of the Increasing Tuition FeeVoice-over: University fees paid by these students are capped at around 3,000 pounds a year. But the government is due to review the situation and the body representing the bosses of England’s universities has a suggestion, to increasing fees to 5,000 or even 7,000 pounds a year.Woman 1: We have a world-class reputation that needs to be maintained. Students, I think quite rightly, expect a very high-quality higher education. And that has to be paid for.Woman 2: Today’s second-year students will leave university with debts of more than 17,000 pounds on average. Under one of the schemes being discussed today, that amount will increase to more than 26,000 pounds, a sum that could take quite a few years to pay off. The questions is, would this increase actually put young people off from applying to university in the first place.Man 1: Potentially yes. Yes, I would have to assess my personal situation at that time. But I think it will put a lot of people off as it’s huge amount of money. Woman 2: I’m doing a history degree so I only have about eight hours of contact a week. So as for my money being wasted, whereas medical students have lots of labs and lots of money spent on them, so I think it would kind of cause me to think twice about going to university and which university I go to and where.Man 2: Well I think it is breathtakingly arrogant of university vice chancellors to be talking about doubling the level of tuition fees and the level of graduate debt in the middle of a recession. I think they need to get out of their ivory tower tolook at what is going on with the economy now. Students are in increasing hardship already and leaving tens of thousands of people graduating with even bigger amounts of debts is reckless and irresponsible.Voice-over: Introducing tuition fees in the first place was controversial and difficult so the government is unlikely to rush to increase them now. Annabel Roberts. ITV News.Clip 4:1. Lead-inTeaching tipsa. Ask students to work in pairs or in groups, discuss these questions andthen share their answers with the whole class.b. It is nor necessary for every student to discuss all the questions, so theteacher may assign one or two questions to each pair or group.c. The teacher may walk around the classroom and provide assistance whenneeded.QuestionsLook at the picture. It shows the job market in China nowadays. Now, describe the picture from the following two aspects.a. What do you see in this picture?b. What does the picture show about job-hunting situation in Chinanowadays?2. Listening skillsWord TipsDownturn n. （经济）衰退Meltdown n. <美俚>灾难Crunch n. 艰难局面Savvy adj. 聪慧的Script of Graduates Facing Difficult TimeVoice-over: Students setting out on life’s journey are feeling the economic strain before they’re even secured their first job. For as the economy contracts, graduate vacancies have fallen for the first time in three years.Woman 1: Most of the other people that I know in my degree, in my course, they’re still struggling to find jobs.Voice-over: Diphian Serran is a final-year student hoping for a first-class degree and praying for a good job. So far, despite numerous interviews and an impressive CV, she’s had bad luck.Woman 1: Very bad luck. Unfortunately. I’ve gone through the interview stage of many, so to the final stage. But once I reached there, I often get, either get rejected or it’s, you know, “we’ll let you know”.Voice-over: The downturn in manufacturing and the meltdown in the financial services mean that nearly half of the employers expect to hire fewer graduates this year. That means the competition on campus had never been tougher. Woman 2: This is the generation of university students who were born and bred in the economic boom. But they are graduating in the economic bust. Recruitment’s down, salaries are frozen.This is crunch time in every sense. Man 1: These times are a lot rougher than they had been the last 10,15, possibly even 20 years. But employers are still recruiting. The brains of today are the profits of tomorrow. The question is whether the graduates are able to adjust their expectations to the realities of the labour market.Voice-over: For this final year engineering students’reality is still great. Vacancies in engineering and public sector are on the rise. Will’s found a job in a bank. His starting salary is 42K.Man 2: There are still opportunities down there for people being smart or, kind of risk savvy enough to get them so it’s just, you know, it’s more difficult but it’s not impossible.Voice-over: The generation who never had it so good as children may find theeconomic realities harder as adults. Penny Marshall. News at Ten. Warwick University.Clip 5:1. Lead-inTeaching tipsa. Ask students to work in pairs or in groups, discuss these questions andthen share their answers with the whole class.b. It is nor necessary for every student to discuss all the questions, so theteacher may assign one or two questions to each pair or group.c. The teacher may walk around the classroom and provide assistance whenneeded.QuestionsLook at the picture and discuss the following questions.a. What is the student holding?b. How does he feel?c. What do you think he is going to do?2. Listening skillsWord TipsBenchmark n. 水平点，基准Indulgence n. 纵容；迁就Deprive v. 剥夺Saddle v. 使负担；强加Justify v. 证明……是正当的Flaw n. 缺点Reckon v. 认为Script of Value of degreeVoice-over: It is the season when 400,000 bright young things write off, hopingtheir dreams will come true. Not a letter to Santa, but a university application form. The government wants half of all our young people to experience the wonderful world of the undergraduate. The joy of learning, of student life, the thrill of graduation.The invitation to high-powered, exciting careers.The reality can be rather different. A few years ago these telesales staff would have been school leavers. Today this publishing firm employs only graduates. Same job, similar salary, different qualifications.Man 1: Fifteen years ago we would’ve probably said the basic requirements would be A-levels. Because that would be the benchmark we would’ve expected our new employees to have achieved. You know now we see the benchmark is being the degree. So I think the very fact that there are far more students leaving university looking for jobs, enables us to specify a degree toda y whereas we wouldn’t have done 15 years ago.Voice-over: Thirty-five per cent of graduates enter the world of work in a job that doesn’t need a degree. And many get stuck in careers they don’t like. Asked what they did want to do, 47% hoped for jobs in media, advertising or PR. Other popular careers include design—favored by 21% of women—and computing, picked by 23% of men. But over 10% of media studies graduates are currently unemployed. It’s the same for design studies. And even worse in computing. Unpopular careers include engineering. Only 9% of students mention that. And yet unemployment amongst civil engineering graduates is only 2.9%.At today’s graduate recruitment fair, thousands of students were searching for jobs. But engineering stands were typically deserted. And those that did enquire often lacked relevant qualifications. The engineering industry believes in encouraging yet more school leavers to go to university may be an expensive indulgence.Man 2: Universities argue that we are not training, we are educating. We are creating people who can think. Now, if we are just producing philosophers and thinkers, I don’t think we are going to resolve the economic needs of thiscountry. I mean, that would be absolutely silly, quite frankly.Voice-over: There are now 60,000 different degree courses in Britain. The biggest increase in so-called cheap degrees, usually humanities or social sciences, which don’t require expensive equipment or laboratories. Universities get money for how many students they have and extra cash if they can woo school leavers from poor and deprived backgrounds. Students are saddled with debts, justified by government on the basis that across a lifetime, a degree is worth an extra 400,000 pounds. But is it?Man 3: There are two flaws in the government’s figures. Firstly they’re based on the percentage of graduates going through our education. Those figures were in a small per cent. In a couple of years’ time one in every two people will go through higher education of that age group. The second big fundamental problem is they were based on an employment market where there was a job for life, Things have changed.Voice-over: Here at this plumbing school in North London, about 20% of the class are graduates who’ve decided to retrain. Many come from just the kind of backgrounds government wants to encourage into higher education. But their experience is hardly an advert.Man 4: By the time I graduated I would say there weren’t the jobs there. So in hindsight, it probably was a waste of time, yeah.Man 5: So how much money do you reckon you can earn as a plumber? Woman1: Well, they say between 50 to 75 thousand in about 10 years’ time. Man 5: Seventy-five grand?Woman 1: Approximately, yes.Script of School DisciplinesSo going back to my question, how do we translate our values into action? To reprise[3] those values, families as the origin of society, the role of schools in backing up and adding to the lessons of home, the need for clear boundariesand for rules of behavior, the diversity and the differentness of children, the obligation to help the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.Earlier this month I spoke about families. Most of all, we need to encourage stable parental relationships for example, as has been suggested, through removing the bias through against cohabitation in the benefits system and using the tax system to support married couples.Yesterday I spoke about special educational needs. We need to radically reform the statementing process to give parents what they need, including a more sensitive and flexible system of categorising special needs. Parents need greater choice between specialist schools and mainstream schools. And until the system is properly balanced, we believe we need a moratorium[4] on the closure of special schools.Today I want to explain something of what we'll do to improve behaviour in the mainstream schools.Sometimes people who discuss education give the impression that some sort of incredibly complex alchemy.It isn’t. We know what works because we see it, in our own country and oversees. The best schools, whether they are private schools, academies, grammar schools, comprehensives,have some simple things in common. Most of all, they have an independent ethos and clear rules on acceptable behaviour.Schools should be places where teachers teach and children learn - not sort of holding centres for children irrespective of how badly they behave. Most of all, they should be places where the kids respect, and even fear, the teachers, and not the other way around. If we want our children to grow up in a loving environment, they need to know where the lines are and not to step over them.Heads need to be able to impose real codes of behaviour and discipline and be backed up by parents.Teachers often say to me that they set clear rules, they enforce them and then the parents come along and take the side of the child. This can completely undermine the authority of the school and contribute directly to bad behaviour.Now many schools have home-school contracts, setting out in black and white what is expected of the school, of the parent and of the child. I'd like to take this idea further and make them enforceable, as requirements of admission and as grounds for exclusion.Head teachers should be able to say to parents, if you don’t sign up to this code of conduct for yourselves and your children, your child cannot come to school as simple as that.And I want to strengthen the position of teachers as well. More needs be done to protect teachers from the tiny minority who are bent on undermining authority in schools by making false allegations of abuse against the teacher. This is a growing problem. A recent survey in SecEd magazine indicated that 20 per cent of teachers had been falsely accused and 55 per cent of teachers knew a colleague in their school to whom this had happened.The Teacher Support phone line is taking almost twice as many calls about pupil allegations as it did a year ago. Yet in the past ten years only three per ce nt of serious allegations have actually resulted in a conviction. And that’s why we believe that teachers should have the full protection of anonymity until the case against them has actually been dealt with.Given the elementary principle that a head teacher must have control over the standards of behaviour in his or her school, this must mean, as a last resort, the power to exclude pupils whose conduct badly disrupts the education of others.Today, at the moment, if a head teacher excludes a pupil, the child has a right of appeal to an external panel run by the local authority. And currently a quarter of the exclusions which are reviewed by appeals panels are overturned. More than half of these pupils are then returned to the school from which they have been expelled.Now just imagine what that does to the standing of the head teacher in the eyes of the students. To see a child, expelled for bad behaviour, swaggering back into the school. It sends completely the wrong message about the relative power of the child and of the school itself. The local authority should be there to serve the school, to help the school, to support the school, not the other way around.。
