Study skills – Managing your time efficiently – Organising your schedule – Note-taking – Overcoming the loneliness of the distance learner – How this course works

Module 1 – Attitudes to Pronunciation Teaching – Terminology in Phonology and Phonetics – Organs of Speech – Phonemes – The Phonemic Chart – Consonants: description and practical applications – Vowels – Cardinal Vowels chart – Diphthongs – Place of Articulation – Research Based project – Materials evaluation

Module 2 – the syllable – consonant clusters – strong and weak syllables – word and sentence stress – the ‘schwa’ sound – marking stress – primary and secondary stress – tendencies in word stress – research based project – weak forms – English as a time-stressed language – Features of connected speech – Materials evaluation

Module 3 – spoken and written forms – intonation – tone units – the tonic syllable – pitch movement – intonation and discourse – teaching and learning intonation – research based project – pronunciation and ‘which’ English – are native speakers the best ESOL teachers? – Strategies for personal development in the teaching of pronunciation

Module 1 – brief history of Discourse Analysis: structuralism, sociolinguistics, post-modernist – coherence in language – cognitive interpretation of language: Schema Theory – social context of language – political context of language – approaches to encourage coherence in discourse (practical case) – discourse communicative methodology and student centredness

Module 2 – teacher talk in the ESOL class – turn-taking research – text structure: cohesive devices (lexical cohesion, tense concordance, pronoun referencing, article referencing, conjunctions, ellipsis, substitution, parallelism) – cohesive devices in the classroom: a practical case – differences between written and spoken language – discourse intonation – teaching discourse intonation in the ESOL classroom – transcribing spoken language

Module 1 – Evaluating course books – Exploiting published materials – Resources and Technology – Using the internet – Adapting authentic materials – Action research project

Module 1 – Factors that contribute to teacher demotivation – A basis for Professional Progress – Peer Training – Sources of valuable feedback – Meetings as a forum for sharing reflections and further development – Practical ideas for moving forward as a teacher: practical case