Learning Journal 3

[David Mowry]

This has been a productive week. I utilized the Schola resources to perform extensive listening tasks. After about an hour of listening to the audio on repeat, I understood the point of the piece and the transition statements used to move from one topic to the next. I later printed out the transcript and compared my reading comprehension to my listening comprehension. Finally, I underlined the points in the reading that I could not pick up by listening. This revolved around looking up new vocab and integrating it into the context of the piece. I also began to understand a grammar point which I did not previously know with the help of my language partner. We found other examples and created practice sentences to make sure I could apply it to other situations. I will use previous workbook excercizes dealing with this point to practice further.

For my extensive listening project, I watched a subtitled movie recently posted to my Diigo. I attempted to recognize the vocab and grammar used, and at times I turned down the sound, read the subtitles, translated the sentence in a way that I would say it and compared it to what was actually said. Vocabulary is more difficult to recognize in speaking than in writing, so it was a good exercize to attempt to extract the words used. This is a useful yet time consuming activity.

I will begin to practice writing with example sentences along a similar theme, and eventually turn them into a composition per my learning plan. Additionally, I will go through the vocabulary in various news peieces, listening activities and conversations to compile them into a list for more convenient studying. With an improved language plan, I now have better direction when it comes to specific study strategies and creation of artifacts. I am improving mostly with my language partner, but I need to place more emphasis on creating tasks and topics for conversation.