Well hello again, very pleased that you are tagging along with my little journey of language learning. Today, I would like to share my experiences in the class of “Introduction to Language Learning.”

  For starters, what I like most of this class is that there are tons of fun opportunities for students to interact with each other, even when the class size is quite large. In other lessons that I’ve taken in NCCU, the majority of classes either have no social activities or only have activities that ask students to solve problems, and then come up with solutions. The latter one is fun and alright, but can sometimes be quite frustrating when you just don’t have the right idea at the given moment or maybe you are just not engaged in the topic at all. In this course, however, the activities are very engaging, like the jigsaw activity we did the other day, or the game in which we have to come up with vague solutions to our planets’ problem and have to let other groups guess, they are all fun because we are always given some context to work with, and this little extra bonus makes things easier for students and let the everything flows just a bit smoother.

  Another awesome part of this class is the midterm, which to me, was just simply fantastic. We were told beforehand that we would be quizzed on the lessons that the professor has taught. Our group (p.s. I will talk about the group in future entries) will be asked to meet up with the professor and have a small conference where we would be tested. And I will be lying if I told you I wasn't nervous going into this midterm. So before our group stepped into the professor’s office, I made sure I studied the lessons and took notes of all the possible things that could be tested on us, fearing that I might fail my group embarrassingly. But when it’s finally time for the showdown, to my surprise, and to many of our group members’ surprise, we were given quiz questions by the professor before we were officially quizzed. Our little group immediately started discussing as fast and as efficiently as we could, and took notes to make sure everything goes right. Later on, the professor asked each individual in our group to answer a question on the quiz paper. And we fortunately did fairly well, and that has to do with the time that we get to spend to come up with the best answers that our group agreed on. And if it weren’t for it, I’m very sure some of us wouldn’t be able to answer the questions soundly. The professor then told us that letting us discuss beforehand was a good way for students to keep in track with their team, and the quiz midterm “quiz” isn’t exactly the main focus. The key is that we all follow up with the class progression. And I felt deeply that this was such a good way for students to learn and keep up, and can only wish that more teachers would do this.

That’s it for this entry, I hope to see you very soon!

 

Brad 11/15/2020