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.