Watch out Freshmen!!

Finally, the last time to say hello before my blog presentation next week,

This semester is coming to an end as well as my learning blog. But before this happens, I want to give some advice for next year's fist-year's students.
I learned a lot in English 1 for IB&M. Additionally, this course is very helpful for you to improve your English skills. This course has not the point to say, ‘just let us pass the course and that’s it’. This course will help you in next semesters and in your future life as well. English is one of the most spoken languages in the world. And hey… why would you study INTERNATIONAL Business and Management, if you do not want to pay attention in class to improve your skills? If you want to work international you have talk to a lot of different persons around the world. I provided a youtube video with different english accents, see how many accents you understand.

I know, firstly, this course sounds ridiculous, you are an upcoming student and you have to go to an English course like in school. But trust me, this is not the same, I learned more then in my last two years in school.

So, I hope I could motivate you to take this course serious. And now, I want to give you some advice how to prepare well for this course.

First of all, learn the vocabularies given in each Unit. I did the mistake to do nothing until the exam. Then I went through the Units and wrote down all vocabularies, which I did not know. And together with the academic word list it was a lot vocabularies. And I hated myself that I did not start to learn in time. However, you do learn the words for yourself and your future career. The teacher does not care what your final grade is going to be and how you want to express yourself when you go abroad.  Learning every week 30 new vocabularies takes you only one hour and I think it is doable.
However, continuously learning will prevent you from loosing track in course, too. And will provide you with higher grades in class.

Another advice I want to give you is about the Reports you have to hand in every now and then.

Try to write your reports at least three days before deadline. You are going to be able to read every day your report again and again, and believe it or not, but each day you go through your report you will find some mistakes, which you can avoid.

Furthermore, when you go through my entire blog, you can see my improvements. I improved my writing skills as well as my presentation skills. I hope it is evidence enough for you to take this course serious. And by the way, if you want to do a favor for your teacher, try to be on time when you have class...

At last but not least, I found a very interesting and funny video about different English accents around the world: How many accents do you really understand? Please feel free to comment.

I have to be honest; I had a lot of problems understanding the different British accents.
I hope this video shows you once again how important this course is. Sometimes, even native speakers have problems to understand people from other English speaking countries.

Finally I want to sum up my advice for students-to-be:

• continuously learning of vocabularies
• prepare your assignments in time
• take this course serious
• try to be on time and try to attend to as many meetings as possible

My personal improvements

Happy New Year everyone,

I hope everybody partied hard and had enough time to spend with friends and family to recharge the battery for the final exams at the end of this month.

This time I want to show you my improvements I made this semester. Due to the first and last graded report we have to hand in I looked up how many academic words, K1-Words, etc. I used, with the help of an online program.

As you might remember, our teachers provided us with the link Vocabulary Profiler (click to see how you are going to score). Our teacher taught us for a 'good' academic text we need around 70% K1-Words and the other 30% evenly spread between K2-Words, AWL Words (academic) and Off-List Words.

At the end of this entry you can my Assessment-report. But firstly, I want to show you the difference improvement from my first to my last report. On the right hand side you can find the score for the Assessment-Report and on the left hand side for the Memo-Report for Stitch Wear. 

As you can see, I improved my vocabulary for AWL Words, almost doubled the amount and decreased the K1-Words. For me, it is a huge improvement. When I think two years back, I would use hardly any AWL Words and my entire text would consist and K2-Words, I guess.

My advice for other students is: write your report a few days before deadline, for instance three days. Read your report everyday twice, when you get up in the morning and before you go to bed. Every time when you check your report you will recognize sentences that you can still improve.

Finally, here you can have a look on my assessment report, I hope you will like it and if not please feel free to give me a feedback.

Assessment report leatty shanghai

I guess it is time to leave and hand in my Assessment-Report. Cross your fingers for me!

As soon as I receive my grade I will let you know.

Have a nice day.