Approaches to Reading and Writing (week 1)

Week 11: At the library  So here I was, going to the class at Bilik Rahim Kajai and nobody is there yet. "I'm early I guess?". So i waited until 2.05pm and still nobody was there. "Class cancel?", check whatsapp, tak ada pun announcement? Then, with a glipse of few seconds, "Oh no!!!! We have to be at the library!" So I immediately rushed out to hail for a Grab car. But thank God I bumped into another classmate who was also forgotten about having class at the library, and yes she got a car (hallelujah). lol. Okay, enough of drama. Let's talk about what I learned in the class. lol.  Basically, I love the activity at the library where we have to opportunity to run here and there searching for book as resources. I love it actually! It's like "Amazing Race" where you always on the run to search for stuff and “siapa cepat dia dapat” thingy. hahahahaha.  Anyway, we gathered few books but it seems only 1 is useful to us. S...

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. 

Continuation (Week 3): Process and Genre Approach Last lesson, Dr. Ikhlas introduced the product approach of writing and further explained to us on how the approach work. Today, she introduced another 2 approaches which is the process approach and genre approach. For most of us (UPM students), we are very familiar with the process approach is you had taken the LAX courses before!  "Process-oriented approaches concern the process of how ideas are developed and formulated in writing. "  Retrieved from: http://www.csuchico.edu/~gthurgood/232/043_processAndProduct.pdf  "Process approaches to writing tend to focus more on the varied classroom activities which promote the development of language use: brainstorming, group discussion, re-writing. Such an approach can have any number of stages, though a typical sequence of activities could proceed ;"  Retrieved from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/product-process-writing-a-comparis...

Week 3: Product Approach This week, Dr. Ikhlas introduced us to the product approach of writing. I've look through the net and here is one of the definition i got: "The product-oriented approach to the teaching of writing emphasizes mechanical aspects of writing, such as focusing on grammatical and syntactical structures and imitating models. This approach is primarily concerned with "correctness" and form of the final product."  Retrieved from:  http://www.csuchico.edu/~gthurgood/232/043_processAndProduct.pdf Well there are many critics about this approach saying it is just merely an imitation of model essay and all. There are also many steps taken in this approach (provided by British Council): Stage 1 Model texts are read, and then features of the genre are highlighted. For example, if studying a formal letter, students' attention may be drawn to the importance of paragraphing and the language used to make formal requests. If studying a ...

Reflection on Week 1 lecture The first week of lecture really opened up my mind on reading and writing. Since young, we had been taught on the "proper ways" of reading and writing like reading word by word (lexical items) and write using phrases and sentences which we remembered as a reader.  Today's lecture introduced the unidirectional model and the multi-directional model as an introduction to reading and writing. To be honest, I don't agree with the unidirectional model where it said our writing is influenced by the way we speak only. It can be several ways and methods.  All in all, I really learned something more on reading and writing and I'm looking forward to the next class and know more theories on reading (i heard we will be introduced to some models which touched on reading). Anyway, thanks for reading! Adios! 

Some information I found..... (Week 2)  I've went through a few websites, and I think it quite informative. So why not I share with you guys right?  Well, I got this from British Council Website: Bottom-up processing happens when someone tries to understand language by looking at individual meanings or grammatical characteristics of the most basic units of the text, (e.g. sounds for a listening or words for a reading), and moves from these to trying to understand the whole text.  Without a doubt, I can relate this to my experience when I was forced to take a foreign language class and was force to at least got a D for it. I took Spanish, and the masculine and feminine thingy is making me crazy! I think my lecturer used Bottom Up approach when she was teaching us last time. I can make meaning with familiar words from a long text but most of the time I'm wrong about the actual meaning....lol. Like what British Council written in their website, learner...

Reflection on BBI3223 Approaches to Reading and Writing (week 2)                      Hey! Welcome back to my blog! How are you doing? Well, I'm doing great, especially when I learned so many new things about reading this week (which I would love to share)! This week, Dr. Ikhlas introduces three different models of reading. Bottom-Up Model Top-Down Model Interactive model Here's what I understand (I might be wrong, feel free to correct me at the comment section): Bottom-Up Model This model emphasized more on letter, words and meaning. Which means, learning how to read better by understanding each words and letter. Top-Down Model This model contains huge emphasis on reader's background, expectation and assumption. It requires the readers to have basis in the language in order to read. Thus, meaning is brought to print, not derived from the print. Interactive Model From what I know, this m...

                                                   Reading and writing, which one comes first. Do your reading inspire your writing or your writing inspire your reading? I'm not quite sure about you who is reading this, but hey, we are told to read more in order to produce a better masterpiece ranging from essay questions (which I love the most cuz I get to write all sorts of story :D) to reports (I hate the most, lol).                                                    Anyway, this is my very first blog ever. I've read many blogs in my entire life but never try to write one, because I'm not hardworking in writing about my life or my thoughts hahaha. So erm, let us begin shall we?  Reflection on BBI3223 Appro...