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
