Offered Optional Courses

The main objective of the course is to improve students' presentation and discussion skills and thus prepare them for the state exam (the defence of their dissertations).

The activities included in the course try to prepare students for drafting and making presentations in seminars and for classroom interaction as second-language learners and teachers.

The second objective of the course is to encourage learners to evaluate their own performance and to engage in self-monitoring and peer-monitoring as means of improving speaking performance.

At the end of the course the students should be able to use information gathered from different sources to prepare a presentation, to make a presentation and handle quwstions in a following dicsussion, to critically assess their language performance, body language and work with visual aids during a presentation; furthermore they should be aware of different strategies for asking and answering questions during a post-presentation discussion.

This survey course examines American literature from the beginning of the twentieth century to present, covering two important literary movements, modernism and postmodernism. The course is designed to introduce students to the ideas and pleasures literature offers us, and encourages students to think about the texts and discuss them in the class. Students are also asked to keep a journal of their thoughts and responses to themes and ideas expressed in the texts.

At the end of this course, students should be able to describe at least two different varieties of literary modernism and discuss how black and white modernist experiments may have influenced each other; appreciate the diversity of modernist authors; see connections between the art and literature of the modern era; discuss several different schools of poetry; describe postmodernism, discuss its causes and origins, and discuss ways in which the twentieth-century fiction and poetry respond to the postmodern condition; explain how minority writers (women, ethnic, racial and sexual minorities) have used postmodern narrative techniques to define their identities.

Students are to analyse and interpret major works of the writers representing the development of the British novel from post-romanticism to the Victorian period. The course will also focus on the chief works, authors and topics of the period and the development of advanced reading and writing skills. Students are also to identify, discuss and list the most representative works and their authors.

This course is designed to improve the fluency of students' writing for academic discourse. Students will be introduced to the process of writing and be guided through the basic steps of English composition. At the end of the course students will be able to critically read complex texts and write complex papers. They will be able to question basic premises and conclusions of different texts in different disciplines and make connections between them. They will be able to select and evaluate the usefulness of various textual sources and form their own argument using these sources as a support. They will also learn the basic skills of writing: planning, outlining, drafting, organizing, and revising papers.

This is not a class in American or British studies, but rather a course in cultural fluency with the emphasis on the difference in social and cultural patterns between the Czech Republic and English speaking lands. Classes will meet for two hours every week and will be organized as traditional seminars in which students are assigned texts on a given subject and come to class prepared to discuss it in open conversation around the seminar table.

The aim of the class is to: 1) Provide future teachers of English with the cultural background necessary for language teaching; 2) Integrate students into group speaking situations; 3) Analyze a cultural perspective that could mitigate the culture shock awaiting those students who plan to study abroad; and 4) Outline an introduction to Czech cultural norms for foreign students studying at Masaryk University, as well as a forum for them to share their insights with their Czech classmates.

Students will use this class to practice their English and mainly develop their vocabulary by studying issues such as idioms, proverbs, similes, collocations, etc. Activities will vary from week to week. As students are training to be teachers, they will be expected to take an active role in their own learning, with an eye toward understanding how to share information with their peers, and later their own students.At the end of the course students will be able to understand and explain English idioms, similes, proverbs, etc. They will be able to prepare a vocabulary exercise and present it and teach it to their peers.

Students will work on broadening their vocabulary and speaking skills. The focus is on areas of vocabulary typical of English, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, collocations, etc. Students work with materials provided, search for information on the Internet, create vocabulary activities to teach a particular set of words or phrases and evaluate these activities. Students also work on an on-line project - on-line glossary, and thus help each other develop their knowledge of English vocabulary.

In the seminars we will explore major as well as minor authors and literary works related to London as a cultural metropolis of the English-speaking world. At the end of the course students will be able to make their own connections between the assigned reading and also question and actively interpret them as well as create their own critical evaluation.

The aim of the course is to provide further practice of problems covered in the foundational pronunciation course (AJ2BP_FF1A, AJ3BP_FF1A), mainly in the areas of rhythm,stress and intonation, to students who are interested in improving an already good performance or provide further assistance to students repeating the foundational pronunciation course or the qualifying exam. After practising different combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables in various rhythm patterns focus moves to practical use of intonation patterns in specific life situations, such as apology, asking for information, giving information, reassurances and the like. Advanced spoken texts are used to further reinforce the use of the individual patterns in an interesting and meaningful way.

In this class, students will develop their speaking and listening skills. We will spend most of our time engaged in discussion, and students will expand their vocabulary and skill using complex structures by actually using the language.

The main goal of the course is to extend students knowledge of English syntax. Based on the differences between the simple sentence, compound sentence, and complex sentence, students analyse different sentences and texts and thus acquire a deeper knowledge of the syntactic structure of the English language. When required, any more problematic areas from English syntax, such as modal verbs, complex condensation, can be included in the course syllabus.

Student will get acquainted with specific needs of young language learners. Different readings for students will be recommended. Students will read articles related to the topics. At the end of the course students should be able: to understand young learner's needs and specifics; to design adequate types of activities for young learners; to make reasoned decisions about the methods and approaches in ELT classes for young learners.

Translation seminar is based on close reading and careful translations of the texts prepared in the faculty LMS system - IS. The students' translations are only then analysed in the seminar and each student presents the solution and discuss the best options during the contact lessons.

The main objectives can be summarized as follows:

• to understand the basic of equivalence translations;
  
• to learn how to deal with basic features of Czech equivalent translations;
  
• to understand the basic principles of translation theory in practical translations.