Besides INTO free writing classes, post-graduate students in Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences also receive free graduate skills enhancement program. The goal of the program is that to help students who are new in UK and whose first language is not English. The program includes academic writing, computer skills whereas one short-coming is that the class last only one hour.
The program is really great but the teaching material and contents are quite similar to INTO. There are not too many practical skills helping on academic writing. The lecturer only gave students writing skills introduction paper and how to avoid the mistakes that students might often make. The knowledge for all the students at the scene all knew it well when they had learnt in university and thus the feedback to teachers was quite little. During the class, I only learned one thing and that was the more academic books, journal or articles I read, the more formal words I might find from the materials.
The lecturer also asked us to be pair and discussed what problems we have encountered about academic writing. I wrote 5 problems that I have encountered recently, for example, conjunctions, word choice, tense and some problems related to writing. My classmates whose native language is English also nodded their heads because of tense. They said they also had the problems with tense especially on academic writing. Besides the tense, we all had a problem with cohesion. How to write an essay or assignment with perfect cohesion for all of us is really difficult. Although, we had an introduction of cohesion and cohesive yesterday but it did not mean we all get the tips to identify the cohesion of every article we read.
PS: I would like to share a film about silent way of TESOL which I have seen in class. . Actually, I can't really do it or all my students will go crazy. Hope you would enjoy it.
我發覺原來透過Youtube欣賞他人的專業教學, 真的是太有趣了! Newcastle的教授還挺愛youtube, 因為當課程悶到一定程度時, 來上一段我放的影片, 頓時全班都輕鬆不少!
順便補上另一支有關於: Audio Lingual Method, 是由土耳其人所拍攝! 頓時發覺土耳其帥哥美女真不少! 我們班上的法提, 典型的土耳其帥哥一個, 高又帥!
