Part One   Introduction

In this unit, we are going to learn about what college is and how you can adapt to college life. You might think that college means an additional four years of school after getting your high school diploma, but it’s not. College opens doors for you that high school doesn’t. Also, college can change you and shape you in ways that you might not imagine. This is a crucial turning point in your life. The knowledge, skills and experience you’ll gain in college can provide you a variety of opportunities. Thus, you’d better make some plans to unlock these opportunities. Well begun is half done. After learning this unit, you’ll know how to become more independent, explore your options on campus and outside the classroom, as well as invest in yourself.

In this unit, we will learn

i. about 60 new words and expressions about college life and how to use them in specific context properly;

ii. language skills including: how to predict the content before listening and infer the meaning, how to scan the article and identify topic sentences, and how to write a public speech.;

iii. how to complete various tasks in a team (Project 1). For instance, how to interview students to find out their main difficulties in adapting to college life and consolidate topic-relevant information; In addition, Project 6 is mainly designed for self-study. You need to study Passages B and C by yourself and learn the SPOCs about reading skills and grammatical competence.

At the end of this unit, we need to summarize the unit from three dimensions: language points, key language skills and intercultural reflection. We will have some language quizzes in class to assess your memorization and understanding. Then we will review the language skills in terms of listening, reading, speaking, writing and translation. Last but not least, you need to critically think about some intercultural reflection questions. The last dimension is the important output to assess your learning as you need to analyze and evaluate what you have learned.