Language learning Journal “5”

This is the final learning language journal that I’m going to write. I thought a lot about what skills I should work on this week, because all the strategies I have, I’ve almost completed. I’ve decided to return to Barron’s Toefl book to learn more on grammar and reading skills. My purpose of reading this book again is because I want to improve some of the area of grammar that I’m weak in. I discovered that this book also includes reading skills, which will allow me to learn more about some structures in reading. The first thing I began on was grammar. I chose to learn more about word forms, which means nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Nouns are used to convey people and physical objects, verbs are used to convey actions or a state of the subject, adjectives describe nouns, adverbs modify adjectives, verbs and other adverbs. I felt that it helped me because it made the ideas clear for me about what the differences were between them, through the examples and exercises that the book had. After I was done with the grammar section, I moved to the reading section. I started to read more about how to find the definition of a word from its sentence. But when I read it, I didn’t find any new ideas or way to find the meaning of the word from the sentence, because I think that it depends on the sentence and the vocabulary that I know. In the end our assignment I wanted to be honest and tell you that I missed one strategy in the grammar skills, which is joining into learning support center to help me with my grammar skills, because at the time that was given to us to apply our language learning plan, there was a lot of other things to do which are: ICT journal, human development project, science project and midterm exams, so I didn’t have time to register in the learning support center. Another reason is that I felt that I learned a lot from the sites that I visited, so I didn’t think that it was really necessary to go learning support center.

Fatima Al-Menahli

Language learning Journal “4”

Working on our language learning journal is going very well this week because we have more time with this post, and we are very close to finish language learning journal. I’ve decided to work on scanning and skimming in reading. I’ve decided to use this website to learn how to scan and skim: http://www.xiangtan.co.uk/readingskim.htm.
This website explained more to me about how to scan and skim properly. Skimming means to look through a book or an article only reading the main parts of the content. For example only reading the title, climax, conclusion and so on. People learn how to skim so that their time isn’t wasted on reading, skimming takes much less time than reading. I also learned how to scan from this website. Scanning means to run your eyes quickly through the story over the words, until you find the word you’re looking for while ignoring all the other things. This website was very helpful to me, because it let me know the full meaning of scanning and skimming, and when to use them.
I kept on going with my writing skills and I visited this website:
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/compcont.html , to help me improve and know more instructions about comparison and contrast. A comparison paragraph is a paragraph where you talk about the similarities of two subjects. A contrast paragraph is a paragraph where you talk about the differences of two subjects. Unfortunately I didn’t really benefit much from this website, because I didn’t think there was enough clarity in the definitions. I thought that the website was confusing for me in some ideas. Next time I will try to read the website carefully before I plan to visit it, before I write it in my language learning plan.

Language learning Journal “3”

I am in the middle of my Language Learning Journal, I return to do some strategies in my grammar skill by using this website:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/ .
This website is about general rules in grammar. I found out that the word “Conjunction” is the name of a rule I’ve been studying, not knowing that was its name. Conjunction is the name of a rule that connects two sentences together. Some examples of Conjunctions are: In addition to, besides, also, furthermore. These words are just a few of a vast list. Prepositional phrases consist of a preposition and an object. The object can either be a noun or pronoun. The noun can have modifiers, for example: into the cold (preposition), broken-down house (object). These phrases that are used as adverbs can take various positions: The city park is around the corner, around the corner is the city park. I learned how to write a Prepositional phrase, here is a small list of commonly used prepositions: About, after, behind, beneath, in spite of, throughout. I learned a lot from this website, and I plan to visit it again and learn even rules and also do quizzes on them.

Fatima Al-Menhali

Language learning Plan” Journal 2”

Language learning Plan” Journal 2”

This week flew by because I didn’t have a lot of projects to do, so I concentrated on this one. I was working on my reading skills this week, and writing. I started on my reading, and read this magazine on my free time. I was reading Fashion Magazine online, using this link: Www.Fashionmagazine.com. I explored this site and what was included in the magazine. This website has a lot of different things to see, like Culture, Shops and services, fashion and many other things, and I can also see videos about different kinds of fashion. The things I liked most are Shops and services, because it makes my life easier and I can buy nice things online including the things in the magazine. I also like the contests they have. Another topic that attracts me is “Fashion loves...” the first time I saw this I thought it was about the love for fashionable clothes, until I explored it more, I discovered it was for our own comments about fashion. Another thing I liked about this magazine site was that I could subscribe to this magazine and get the magazine delivered straight to my door. I could either subscribe for 1 year or 2, I get 10 issues for 1 year, and 20 for 2 years. I learned many things when I read this magazine, for example, I learned about famous people and their sense of fashion. And some of the vocabulary I learned were; quintessential, Architecture and trend and many other words. The advantages to this are that I can not only use these words for fashion, but also for other things. This also increases my credit for vocabulary. This was the first time I read a magazine in English, and I felt like I made the right choice in choosing this magazine to begin improving my reading because a lot of girls like fashion and it was a good start for me to get used to reading magazines.
The second strategy I worked on was writing. I decided to find out more about academic writing. I visited this website: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/special/esl.shtml. In this website, I learned what I have to think about before writing, I learned about the fundamentals if a paragraph, the structure of an essay, academic argument and the thesis sentence. That helped me a lot in my writing and improved my thinking about different types of writing.

Fatima Al-Menhali

Language learning Journal “1”

Language learning Journal “1”

I have been really busy this week with my project on how to apply some of my strategies which will improve my English and some of the other skills. I would truly love to speak and write English as if it were Arabic. I want to be able to write a sentence without having any doubts on my spelling. I want to learn English because it will help me in the future and because most of the good companies are based in English. This week I started to apply my English learning plan, and I will work on the grammar part during these couple of days. I have started to implement one of my strategies in grammar skills by visiting this website to improve in verb tenses and do some exercises on it. http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/verbtenseintro.html.
Through this website I learned when the appropriate time was to use these tenses. For example, when the sentence was past tense, I used to look for the past tense of the verb. Although this site was very helpful to me, I still don’t know whether or not all words have a past, present and future tense, such as: broadcast, dream, hang. In addition I’m still in doubt why there are some words that are spelling change, and some that’s spelling doesn’t. For example, “My dream is to be an amazing doctor” present tense, but if we want to say it in past tense we must change the word, and it will be “I dreamt that I became a doctor”. I advanced my skills due to the site having a lot of exercises and notes to help me understand everything clearly. In my English learning plan, I wrote that I will spend half an hour reading Barron’s Toefl book which contains different rules of grammar but when I started to read it, the time went by quickly and I felt that I learned a lot so I decided to continue learning and I did it for about an hour more. It gave me knowledge about the different rules in grammar, such as: Word forms, Clauses, sentence structure, verbs and verbal’s. The thing I learned most was Clauses and sentence structure because it will help me in improving my writing. During these two weeks, we were given this time to apply our English learning plan. I finished part my grammar plan so I decided to change and begin part of my reading plan. So on Thursday, I read the story “Oliver Twist” written by Charles Dickens, online using this website: http://www.readbookonline.net/title/275/ , which helped me with my vocabulary and allowed me to practice meanings without having to turn to a dictionary. The story is about a young boy named Oliver whose mother was sick and died after giving birth to Oliver. Oliver was brought up in a workhouse. He attacks a man for insulting his dead mother, he is severely punished for this, and then he runs away to London. In London he meets a man named Jack Dawkins, known as the Artful Dodger, he is a member of the Jew Fagin’s gang of boys, and he trains boys to become pickpockets. I thought “Oliver Twist” was a great story, and I felt that Oliver was a really innocent and good boy. I learned how important a mother’s role in life is, and how important family is. I will try to keep track of my Language learning Plan thoroughly this week, Because I felt like I had to do more last week but unfortunately I couldn't due to a lot of projects and homework.


Fatima Al-Menhali