Approaches to Reading and Writing (week 1)

Week 11 (Beginning of another research) Like most of my fellow classmate, my reaction was "Nooooooooooo". Yea, i am already so done with my FYP, and now another research pop out. But at least this was guided attentively by Dr. Ikhlas herself. We were exposed to different steps of conducting a research. Firstly, we had to narrow it down our topic of interest. Then, we have to decide how we are going to get our resources (was it video, research article, books, etc.). After that, we started to plan for our methodology, like how we write our chapter 3 in our deadly FYP.  When I say "deadly", it is really killing me day by day! Errrrgggh!  Butttt，I know how hard it is to plan a proper class activity, cuz I had friend who is also a lecturer teaching English to a group of students from Vietnam. Through that friend, I realized how hard it is to plan a class activity so that your student really learn something by the end of the day. Therefore, I would really...

Week 5: Campbell's Article  I gotta say, Campbell's article is one of the kind.  Humans evolved from apes, females are not motivated by power, men are aggressive........... wow........really wow........ However, Campbell did really triggered our thoughts by presenting lots of interesting information and facts. The only problem is......it's 50 pages long! Well thank goodness it's a group work! So there were discussion on feminism, each group send a representative to present what we read and all.  Since the topic in the previous class was schematic knowledge on reading, I have to say, schematic knowledge did help in allowing more understanding when we were reading Campbell's article, especially on  Darwin’s evolution theory, or humans history and also the current issues (feminism).  Overall, it was a good article which triggered lots of discussion and debatable issues. 

Week 5 (Schematic Knowledge)  This week, Dr. Ikhlas continue on reading strategies, and this time it's on schematic knowledge. For example: 1) Text to self 2) Text to world 3) Text to text Eventually, this was proposed by  Keene and Zimme rman (1997), where they stated that  students comprehend better when they make different kinds of connections.  1) Text to self Text-to-self connections are highly personal connections that a reader makes between a piece of reading material and the reader’s own experiences or life. An example of a text-to-self connection might be, "This story reminds me of a vacation we took to my grandfather’s farm." 2) Text to world Text to world  Text-to-world connections are the larger connections that a reader brings to a reading situation. We all have ideas about how the world works that goes far beyond our own personal experiences. We learn about things through television, movies, magazines, and newspaper...

Week 4 (Reading Strategies) (Continuation) In the previous blog, i talked about pre-reading and while reading stage, so today we moved on to the post-reading strategies.  Basically, after you read a text, you will need to summarize everything. But then, there are certain things which we should take note of....... Remember a summary should be brief. Use the author's conclusions and also look at introductions. These will have drawn together the ideas in the text. Look at the words you highlighted, or annotations you made. How would you explain what you have learnt to somebody else? Questions to guide your summary: What? Why? When? Where? How? After the overall discussion on the article and also using the reading strategies, I think those points that Dr. Ikhlas presented are quite useful for us to read (especially for our FYP). However, the cons of those strategies could be time consuming. That is why most of us ignore the strategie...

Week 4 (Reading Strategies)  This week, Dr. Ikhlas wanted us to bring out own laptop and also print out a very long article which was posted on the Putrablast (a UPM e-learning platform). Was surprise to see such long article! lol.  Anyway, here are some introduction on the reading strategies introduced in today's class.  Basically, you can ask lots of questions before you read a text like: Definition: What is ....?  Where does ... fit? What group does ... belong to? Characteristics: How would I describe ...?  What does ... look like ?  What are its parts? Examples  What is a good example of ...?  What are similar examples that share attributes but differ in some way? Experience What experience have I had with ....? What can I imagine about ...? Therefore, Dr. Ikhlas do tell us to ask as many questions as possible before we read that very long article, which i think most...

Week 3 (Continuation): Genre Approach Genre approach is almost the same with product approach where it concerns with the social purposes of the documents. For example: formal letter, memo, report writing, etc. It f ocuses  on the linguistic & social contexts in which the writing is produced. Study by Luu (2011) reveals that most of the students gained the control over the key features of the required recount genre in terms of social purposes, language features and schematic structure. Genre approach have more awareness on: –   Structure & language features –   Audience –   Purpose –   Context This approach might be useful to students who have little exposure on authentic English writing as it provide guidelines for the students in producing a writing based on the genre.