Journal (5)

Now I’m in the last journal. I have lots of thing to do projects, homework’s and presentations. I have to change my schedule this week because we have 10 days free so I can do everything and prepare myself for the next weeks. Even I feel that I don’t have enough time to all things but I have to work hard in this time to finish what I have to do.

I start this week with reading. I read a new story from my library. In this story there were some questions that I have to answer when I finish reading. It helped me focused more in some important details. I finished this story in 4 hours and I enjoyed reading it a lot. I practiced important skills which are my speed and my focusing in the tasks. Also, I worked a little bet with summarizing skills. After I finish reading this story I tried to memorize some points to write my summary. It was a good practice for me because it helps me change my ideas and work on using new words instead of using the same vocabulary in my writing.

However, the speaking activity that I have done with my friend was something like a dream for me. I was speaking without any stopping, no repeating for the same vocabulary and I was very comfortable with my way of speaking. Then my friend gives me a little feedback. I have the same problem with “it” I don’t know how can I stop say “it” at the end of sentence. She told me to decrease my speed were I have to because sometimes when I start to talk my speed go fast and my ideas come in so what I do is I tried to say everything after I forget some important points. Know what I have to do is to control my speed with my idea to be more comfortable.

I will complete working with my weakness area in each skill to improve myself in the language. In addition to that, I will try next time to work on different skills to be more in general with my areas of improvement.

Journal (4)

This week and after I finished the midterm exams I decided to work on the fourth journal. I have many things to do instead of working with my language learning plan. The projects are two and I haven’t finished them so I most finished them in this week. I feel frustrated after the math exam because I didn’t do well on it, so I was a little bet lazy and I haven’t work a lot on my language learning plan.

I worked on this website http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/general/essay/index.xml which has a lot of thing. There are essay topics, essay plans, taking notes, analyzing, summary and many different things that are related to the writhing skills. I like this site very much because I can learn the foundation of the writing skills and the most important points that I have thinking of if I write an Academic essay. The most important section that I found is Academic writing section. I know what Academic writing is and I sow the differences between it and the general writing. After that I choose a simple topic about teaching in my life. I wrote about it then I gave it to my sister to chick it to me. I found that I’m improving now because I usually doing writing practice. More details her is my problem because when I write any essay I think that I’m giving details but I’m not so I have to work more with this point and I must be careful and being more specific.

Another thing that I was very happy with is that this week we went to Marina Mall with my teacher and my classmates because we have a project about toys so we went there to choose the toys. Why I’m happy?! I was very comfortable with the sellers when I was speaking with them. Also, we had a nice discussion with the lecturer in Early Learning Center. He was talking with us about the toys and this center. So I had a very important speaking practice without any thinking of what we will go to do.

Journal (3)

Actually this was the hardest week for me because this is the week before the midterm exam and I tried to focus more on the courses that I have exams in. However, I prepared myself to have some time for practicing some English skills.

I’ve visit the website that I have for reading practice which is http://eslus.com/LESSONS/READING/READ.HTM. I found some lessons is this website that can improve my reading skills. One of these skills is reading speed. There are some stories that I can read to increase my reading speed more and more because her is my weakness. That’s why I have to practice it each week four days at least for two hours. Also, it’s help me to recognizing words quickly and it’s not necessary to know the meaning of the words but just I have to take a general idea about the text.

The most interesting section in this site is speed reading exercises. Which include the text with time and there are some questions that I have to answer in 10 minutes. For me it was very helpful and funny at the same time. The questions are meaning of words, grammar and some general questions.

I hope in the time coming to start doing the practice in different websites and get high levels to develop my skills in reading. Even I have improved some of them but I still needs to word on more than this. This helps me in college in the exams and in my daily out of college.

Journal (2)

In this week I found some difficulties in organizing my time because I have a lot of work to do in addition to doing my journal. I started working with my plan for improving my language. First of all, I would like to talk about speaking. I this week I discussed with my friend some points to put a schedule that is good for my time and her time. Then we started to think of some important topics that we can discuss. After that, we started by the first topic which was about a very important issue in our city and other cities in the UAE “Traffic Jam”. For me this is a huge problem in Abu-Dhabi because all the people go to their work at the same time. In addition this making everyone in an unenviable situation and this would increase traffic accidents, which has become the scenes that should we see daily in the morning and early afternoon. Because of that we have to be careful when we drive and when crossing the street. My advice was we can arrangement ourselves to shorten the number of cars. For example, my sister and I work in a different direction from the other, but we start and finish at the same time. Which means instead of getting out of home in two cars we can getting out of home in one car, so there will be less number of cars and accidents are road will be safer for everyone.

After we finish this conversation I asked her to give me advices on my speaking. She told me that when I talk I take a quite long time to think of what I have to say or organizing my idea. This is an important point to me put it’s have a disadvantage which is the time is goes quickly so I have to think quickly and don’t loss time while I’m thinking of what I have to say next. However, I have good ideas and nice way of thinking and I ordered my idea correctly. I found a weakness area in my speaking skills which is I don’t talk for long time that means I usually summarize my idea instead of talking more and giving details.

The conversation that I have did with my friend was very helpful to me because its increase my fluency and help me practicing my speaking. For the next time I will try as much as I can to be more specific and giving more details to increase the time of speaking and to develop me fluency more and more. Also, I will try to start the conversation by thinking for two minutes to organize my ideas and to be more comfortable while speaking.

Journal (1)

In this journal I will talk about what I did as the first step for my language learning plan. In the last weekend I wrote two paragraphs about two different topics and those was almost from 150 to 200 words for each paragraph. One of them was about the first month in B.ED and the other one about family and friends in our life. After I finish writing I gave the two paragraphs to my sister. Then she corrected both of them to me. Also, she gave me a feedback for my writing. What I learned from her feedback is that I have problems with supporting ideas. This means, when I write I didn’t put many examples, explanation or specific details. So she advised me to be more specific with the ideas.

The other thing that I’ve did is that I want to my small library at home to choose a new book to read it. I saw a book about “How to teach health”. Firstly, when I read this book I practiced my speed and I increase it and I know some new information about teaching. The most important thing that I learned is when I read I have to focus on the information in the task to know the general idea about it. Also, I learned how to know the meaning of the new words without using the dictionary or the translator. I practice that by reading the sentence that containing the new word more than once and trying to check around with words to see if the word is an adjective, noun, verb or anything else. Also, the new words help me a lot because after that I watched a film that has the same new words so I was very happy for that because I didn’t need to be looking for the meaning of the new words.

Everything I did to improve my learning skill was helpful for me. For the next time, I will try to focus more on summarizing tasks because here is my weakness. Also, I will work with my pronunciation.