Week 5

A1.
For me, the best way to learn something is through practices. A good athlete not only has the talent but also trains a lot. For students, practice is also very important since if we do not practice for several times, we may not remember what we learned or distort the content of books. However, although we have to practice a lot for our studying, we should not just memorize the articles in books or the content that teachers teach us. It can not improve your academic level and expect to improve your exam scores. Some people might consider the scores of exam are the most important thing when students study in school, but scores are just scores. We should find out the essential of what we learned and transform the teachers' and authors' knowledge into our own ideas; we should not just copy others' articles or speeches because the purpose of our studying is not to duplicate other people's concepts but to apply our own knowledge in our lives. In conclusion, there are two important things that we have to understand when we are learning something. First, we need to practice what we learn or we can not have a good performance of our learning. Second, we should transform other people's knowledge into ourselves' knowledge because we are humans, not copy machines.

A2.
I think "strategy" and "skill" are two different things. In my opinion, "strategy" is "how to do", and "skill" is "what do we have." For example, if a baseball pitcher who understands several kinds of pitches, those pitches are his skills (What he has). When the baseball pitcher is playing a game and facing hitters, he has to use different pitches or different speeds in different situations (how to do). For students, when we learn english in school, we have skills to read, write, listen and speak english (What we have). When we take an english test, such as TOFEL test, and work on the reading section, if we try to ruminate every question, we can not get a high score becasue we have no time to finish all the reading questions. If we just guess some questions that are too hard for us and finish all the reading questions, we can get ta better score (how to do). Although we can also learn strategies from teachers, I think it is "strategical skill" but not "strategy." The reason is that even we learn strategies from teachers, we might not use the strategies due to some reasons such as unsuitable for us. For me, a "strategical skill" could be a "strategy" only after we utilize it.

A3.
Topic 1: How to create GOs quickly for articles of science & engineering
For science & engineering, there are some know-hows that can help us create GOs in on time.
Topic 2: How to use GOs in computer programming
Computer programming is similar to GOs: concise and logical.
Topic 3: How to use GOs in graduate school
In graduate school, we have to read a lot of articles and journals for our research and thesis; however, we can not memorize all of them. GOs can help us to reread those articles and journals.

Week 3

A1.

This week I learned new things in the Academic Writing class – interview and questionnaire. We have to write our essay with interview and questionnaire in this term. I think it is because our teacher, Bill, want to give us new challenge. In last term, we just needed some reference (books, journals, or articles) and it is much easier for me since I have an experience to write my master thesis which has eighty pages and forty-three references several years ago. However, I have no idea to write an article with interview or questionnaire because I never seem that in engineering journals. I learned interview is qualitative and questionnaire is quantitative. When we interview, we should focus on the quality – fewer interviewees and fewer questions but more detail and more specific questions to different people. In contrast, questionnaire needs more people to fill out it and the questions must be clear. If the questions are ambiguous, the survey will be failure since we can not get the data that we need. For both interview and questionnaire, we should avoid biased items and terms. That kinds of questions also can not have a useful result for us.

A2.

In this week, I learned about the election of the United States President is different with Taiwan President. In Taiwan, we just focus on the number of votes because the winner is the candidate who has the most votes. In the United States, the candidate of President who has the most votes is not always the winner. Every state has different stste's electoral votes which depends on how many residents it has. When a candidate get the most votes from a stste, this candidate can get all the stste's electoral votes of th state. I think it is strange that a candidate (if there are only two candidates) who get 49% and 1% has the same result – lose all the stste's electoral votes. For this reason, if a political party believe that they can not get the most votes in a state, they will give up any activity in that state. Furthermore, they only have few activity in certain states if they know they can get most votes in those states. Although I think it is bizarre, it is a ecnomical way for each political pary because they can only spend money in a few states that they have possible to win.

A3.

Step 1. Skim the article and make sure what it talk about:

I can have an outline of the article before creating a GO.

Step 2. Find out all the signal words and decide the pattern:

Different types of signal words can generate different pattern.

Step 3. Make sure the relation of all items and write them into the graph:

I can write every item at prepared location and need not alter their location in the next step.

Step 4. put symbols such as arrow and equation:

This step can let my GO more clear since the symbols are visual.

A4.
What the questions are in GOs research?

1. Are GOs only supported by specific empirical studies?

2. What is the best type of GOs?

3. Lack research which focus on L2 learners.

4. Most objects of studies only have short-term training.

What are the merits of GO instructions suggested by researchers?

The merit is that students who emply GOs can improve their comprehension and memory of texts.

Week 2

A1

This week, I learned what logical connectors are and how to use them in Graphic Qrganizers class. There are 11 categories: Time, Condition, Addition, Example, Clarification, Comparison, Contrast, Cause – Reason, Effect, Sequence, and Summary. Aside from that, each category has one to four types: sentence conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, and prepositions. Although I know most of the words, sometimes it is difficult to use logical connectors well since the words that I usually use are limited. It is totally no problem to employ my limited logical connectors to write a short article, but it is a big problem to write a long article. For example, we can use first, second, and third to state the order. When we have to write several kinds of orders, always use the same words will make the long article sound monotone. To remember the logical connectors is also useful for reading tests. When we do not know some words in sentences, which include logical connectors, we can guess the meaning of the words. It is a good method to be utilized in reading tests, especially in TOEFL tests. I hope that I can memorize all the logical connectors because it is helpful to improve my reading and writing level.

A2

I learned one thing at this Halloween – I should let my son be familiar with his snowman costume before Halloween. My wife tried to get my son to put on his snowman costume in the morning on Halloween but she failed. My son refused to wear the costume since he was afraid of it. After dinner, we tried this task again and still struggled to put on the costome. Finally, we succeeded after one hour later. Then, my son decided to get out of our building so we changed our plan – we decided to walk to Ala Moana Center. We only got some candies since it was a little late, but it was an interesting experience for my son although he was not so satisfied with his costume. As the result, we now know that we should let him choose his costume and wear it several times before Halloween in the future.

These pictures are worth a thousand 50 words :-D



A3

My native language is a dialect, Taiwanese which has no words, so there is no reading strategies about that. However, I can talk about Mandarin because our official language in Taiwan is Mandarin. Although I learned Mandarin in elementary school, my Mandarin level was the top level in the national exam. Unfortunately, I do not know any reading strategies about that. I just read plenty and various books. This is the best way to improve any language if we have enough time.

A4

I have no question about creating GOs now. I am just curious about the last name "He" is what word in Mandarin.