i want to share a knowledge that i get from listening workshop that provide by my tuition class.I learnt about listening skills. Listening is important to prove that the students are paying attention and encourage concentration in class so that they will be able to make questions if there is a certain part of the lesson that they do not understand. Selective listening is different from active listening because listener can choose or pick what they want to listen. Together with listening skill, the lecturer taught about the connection between listening and note taking skills. If a student wants to be an active listener, one must practice note taking. When one listens to something and practicing note taking simultaneously, he will become more alert with the lesson learnt. I am poor in listening skill. I could not even remember the things that the lecturer has told me in the class once I reached home. Because of that, I always tend to forget about assignments and tasks that has been given by lecturer and to overcome this problem, I jot down everything especially the date and the details about my assignments. I even wrote those things on a stick-it-note and paste it at my closet to make sure that I am not missing anything important. My friends and I who are poor in listening skill tried our best to attend class early so that we can go sit in front. I also tried to watch English movies without subtitles to make sure that I concentrate and listen to what the dialogues say as well as improve my listening skill. On Wednesday, in the same week, a workshop has been held to expose to students about how to search or find information using databases. Through this workshop, we have clear information on how we can find academic information that we are going to use in our assignments, researches and theses.

      In this class, I studied about summary and paraphrase. Summary is shortening or decreasing 50% or less word from original article. The purpose is to simplify the original and make it easier to digest. I have to think of the receiver of my summary as someone who does not understand the subject matter very well. By practicing this, one is more likely to do an effective job as well as save my time to identify the main idea of the topic. The basic steps to summarize are read the original document, fully understand what the topic is all about, combine two or three sentences into one, and check my work whether the main point is there and if I have missed any important parts. Paraphrase is giving the meaning in another form which required me to restate and reword. Summary and paraphrase is twin. They are not identical but always come together. So the definition of summary and paraphrase is shortening the original document in my own words. The next one is synthesizing which is one level up than the other two. Synthesize is accumulating information from various sources that are needed when I finish doing research for a term paper or thesis. Class then proceeded to the right ways to do citation and quotation. The difference between these two are citation required writer to rephrase author’s original words but maintain the meaning while quotation enable writer to take the exact words from original author without any changes. I also learnt that there are actually two types of quotation that are short quotation and long quotation and the correct way to use both of them. The lecturer gave an exercise on how to summarize and taught us about which words can be taken out and which words are not. I was not aware that when I was trying to rephrase the words to make it shorter, I was actually changing its original meaning. I am now fully aware that I cannot simply rephrase any words without checking them first. Reference list that is used by universities in Malaysia follow APA (American Psychological Association) format. There are different formats for each sources including book, journal, online website and others. I also learnt about format used for cover pages and it is actually can reflect someone’s professionalism. 

 READING SKILL

In this  week, I want to share with you about reading skill. i want to share with you how to read effectively. First of all, students had to do some self evaluations. We had to ask ourselves whether we are a smart reader or not? Do we know and apply any strategies to be smart readers? we learnt ways to improve reading comprehension. There are active reading strategies, start with something general, guide my reading, reread difficult passages, highlight keywords and others. we have been told that we can apply the C.R.E.A.M learning strategies that we have learnt in the first week of class to improve our reading skill. When I am in any tests that reading skill is required, I always use a lot of time and that always make my time management mess up and sometimes I cannot finish my test on time. To avoid this problem from repeating again, I have to practice speed reading. we have some ways to improve reading speed. Some of the ways are finger tracking, know when to read aloud as well as keep my eyes moving forward. But in some situations, slow reading might be helpful. I am that kind of person who cannot concentrate on my reading when I am in busy or noisy environment. I have to reread the passages all over again and because of that, I take more time that is needed. To overcome this problem, I tried to read articles in newspaper or magazines and asked my friend to set the time for me when I was in public places. I practiced the finger tracking and highlight keywords strategies, and fortunately I managed to solve my problem and finish the reading on time.