a whole new semester!!

Well, I've never been aware that the 6th semester in my course would be the most tough days at all. Many other senior students, of course, always have shouted out that.
As almost know, I spent whole summer vacation just doing nothing worth, now I started to regret little and little.

By the way, that's not the point today. The thing is that, I'm starting to post something related with all the courses of this semester from now on.
Yes, a new semester is already started!

need to be changed

-Getting up lately, comicboock-handed killing time, doing nothing worth, and everything you can imagine the worst.


I feel like I should confess nowaday life of mine, though there's no one to read this blog(yes I know, it has a counter. lol)
Not knowing what has made me become "the representative of laziness," something suddenly struck on my mind and now I'm sitting in front of my monitor.

I have to be changed!

As summer goes on, I have missed a lot of things to do: studying English everyday, completing an essay, and so on. Did I set on too big goal to achieve? Was my will too weak? What on earth is my problem!

I belive in that I'm not late yet and there's still a chance to fix it up. Please watch me to the end.
I'll change my life, seriously.

July, hurray~!

I've long been looking forward to July(since March maybe), simply because I thought it was almost impossible to do what I want to do during the school semester. However I should accept the truth; it is one of the most typical, traditional, and transparent excuse for one's laziness.
As one part of *not* being lazy, I'm starting to attend a writing class at Pagoda in Jong-no area. After taking the very first lesson, the idea of posting a new article on this blog struck my mind and I'm trying to do that now ;)
From now on, I'll do more effort to post (whatever) regularly. I promise. (or probably mistakes! lol)

Listening source

I'm trying to find some listening sources for Hyung-ho's final-term exam.

Listening #6
AP news dictation

Listening #7
VOA news

Listening #10
BBC news

Incredible Panda!

My latest movie was "Ironman" and there was no doubt to say it is pretty awesome. Today I could be come to find the another most interesting movie and laugh all the time without any hesitation, any thoughts, and any worries watching this big funny (powerful, yeah in sort of~) Panda and his friends. I feel like I'm going to write a kind of review thing... of course when I get ready to do it. ;) Anyhow, look at it! Isn't it awesome, huh? I promise you it's more gorgeous than ever you imagine, to watch it on huge screen of moview complex with 3D sound.

Self-Acess Reading Resources for L2 readers

Purpose: to faciliate good self-accessible reading materials to present/future students for the purpose of

• providing the supplement materials of a textbook (for more intensive and extensive reading)
• adding or activating the schemata of the readers (for extensive reading)
• having the students choose what they like to read on their own interest, proficiency and other needs
• having them exposed to authentic texts with authentic audiences and authentic purposes

I named this project Reader's Hill which expresses the process of reading and joy of reading itself.

Here, visit the project web page >> Reader's Hill
or just click the button above "Reader's Hill"

1. Target: High school 2nd Kyohaksa.

2. Purpose: This Self-Access Reading Resources(SARR) would be used as supplementary texts by all the different-level students in my class. Add more, they can interact freely through the web-board and its comment function so that no other gorup or student would be never isolated from each other. In the very first step, as I've been making as the "assignment" of Prof. Kim, of course it is impossible to make it with full body at one time. For that reason, I just collected some rather difficult passages and placed them for higher-level students.

3. Collection plot: There are 12 categories and each category represents the lesson topic on the textbook. Number of items in each category vary from one or two to six or more.


4. Categorization: topic-based

Unbelievable!

I've never seen this guy behaves so. When I first saw this crazy clip, I just thought it might be a celeb-like person who imitates like Tom. How could I imagine "TOM CRUISE" the geek!

News feeds

As a sweet fruit of hard endeavour, I introduce this wonderful widget.
Springwidgets offers a lot of useful widgets. Among various items, this RSS Readers meets my needs. It allows bloggers to read all the different rss feeds at one frame. Since I've wanted to integrated some news feeds on my blog, it consisted of ABC top news, CNN world news, The Economist lattest news, and The Times top stories.
I hope all you guys be pleased with reading these news on my blog.

Impulsive big-big remodeling

Indeed, I should have gone to bed right after coming back home.
...
I changed my blog template "finally." For that job, I have repeated loosing all the items and making them again until now(damn.)

Now I don't know what to say and just want anyone to be able to understand me, to see what I've done, to tell me what I'm doing(still now...), and why the hell did I start it!(damn again)

The thing among these terrible things is that,
I got the "widget" that I've been looking foward to having it so eagerly.

monthly plan

Finally, my troublesome spring semester is going away. Not to waste comming time, I decided to write down things to do on this blog.

• June: applying internship program, final-term, road trip to Jeju,
• July: (depending on the result of internship) working for 000(not decided yet), certificate(computer use)
• August: keep working, TOEFL
• September: keep working, TOEFL, Chinese character
• October: keep working, TOEFL, Chinese character
• November: (not decided yet)
• December: (not decided yet)

I think I'm going to work to make some money for next semester, and to save it for staying abroad.

(but I'm still not sure of anything)

Free tickets!!

15(THU), May - vs Woori Heroes
29(THU), May - vs Doosan Bears
3(THU), July - vs SK Wyverns
18(FRI), July - vs Lotte Giants

Recently changed template

I just found some usable templates but I cannot implement it. I'm gonna try to fix it.

http://www.geckoandfly.com/2008/04/16/the-erudite-template/

extensive reading project

I'm planning to make my individual web project become a part of assignment or extra work that my students have to finish it before the next class begins. I don't think it's easy for both students and me to do more job during the class. It is also impossible to treat all the students equally in one class whose proficiency and reading ability is never the same.
So I will compose my webpage like "agora" where all the different reading sources exist in one place, where readers can express their opinion and thought freely, and where all of us can interact each other.

TETE

During the discussion from one of my class we talked about TETE and our team supported positive position. While I was trying to protect our position I found a research about TETE.

영어로 진행하는 영어수업에 대한 초등교사의 태도, 김성연(한양대학교)

The study includes lots of rational for TETE.

Although the students have lack of skills and knowledge about English itself, they have almost intrinsic ability to predict and guess the meaningso the more classes they have, the higher level of comprehension they achieveand finally it could be helpful for English learning.

(이완기, 2000)

This is one citation.

discussion topics for extra class

· Orthography
: writing system(letter, spelling)

· Phonemic knowledge
: not the phonetic knowledge(knowledge about individual sound), but how to pronounce in specific phonemic context(e.g., aspiration, assimilation, linking etc..)

· Language structure
: grammtical rules

· Cohesion
: grammatical, lexical, linguistic relation within the text
e.g.,) Mary bought a new pencil. She put it in her drawer
Mary - she
(coherence - semantic relation between the text)

Make the...

01 PURPOSE

I already set up my blog last semester (fall, 2007) on blogger.com and rarely used it before. In this semester Prof. Kim required me to do something new on my blog. This plan is totally intended to make my dead-like blog become whole new self-access learning portal. Through this job few things are expected at the end.

▪ It may replace already existing my own link portal (link).
▪ It may be used to help me study English regularly.
▪ I may learn a lot of brand-new computing techniques.
▪ I can be familiar with blogging itself.



02 ORGANIZATIONS

I only selected a few categories from provided items. – Although I didn’t make my mind to use all of them, it’s true I am still impressed with all that complex and interesting functions of bloger.com. Since the purpose of this changing is based on actual use of it, I put the top priority on the link and feed. And then, I came to find a looking-good graphic banner and finally I could steal it from anonymous as the result of trying to find some fabulous widgets. This widget indicates the weather and counts the number of visitors.
In terms of contents (posts), there are not such a many explanations. I post an article semi-regularly for the sake of Prof. Kim these days, completing the assignments (two weekly journals by Prof. Kim).



03 LISTS OF LINKS

DAILY	CLASS	DICTIONARY	SCHOOL
Cartoon Daganda baseball news weather on NAVER traffic info Congnamul	Teaching English Reading Computer & English Edu. Edu. Method & Tech PLLT Am&Br English Literature	BNC Just The World Phrase Finder Idiom Dictionary Word Spy	Home Schooling Central Library Total Information System Mini Web

04 PAGE LAYOUT

Activation by Schema

First of all, I would say it's totally true that the schema activates my reading process. I'm going to take just one simple example, TOEIC. As I believe all the students in Korea should have seen how the TOEIC effects on whole society, I strongly think most of university students (and even high-school, middle-school too) have taken that test at least once or more. So, we all know the process of solving the questions of TOEIC and how to read it. However, the more familiar to the passages I become, the less attention I tend to give to them. For that reason, If any sort of little unfamiliar question shows up, I cannot avoid myself being embarrased. At that time, "schema" works amazingly.
First, I scan whole passage and try to find any clues for my guessing. Once I catch up anything, I judge what the passage is about. Then previous knowledge which was deep in my mind comes out. For example, If I see the word 'Fallingwater' and the name 'Le Corbusier', I can conclude it is about architecture. And I recall the books about architecture, miscellaneous information about architecture and architects, and even pictures of Le Corbusier. ;)
Eventually, I can complete my job rather easily, whatever questions are given.
(of course only when I have at least a little tiny information about the question.)

exam info

5/26(or 29)
1. 20 multiple choices
from textbook, discussion topics, notes
2. 5 short essays
3. 1 essay (no longer than half page)

RSS

http://blog.naver.com/dogstylist

good site to practice pronunciation

this site offers the most difficult phonemes to pronounce :)
that's what I really need


http://international.ouc.bc.ca/pronunciation/

What type of learner am I?

Recently I take the course which is conducted to help students develop their autonomy and it's never difficult to say this course is quite useful. One of the most valuable experiences is that I came to know what type of learner I am. Of course to judge someone(or even myself) is not such a easy thing. That's why I can tell just one thing.

In terms of orientation, there are many of them; visual, audio, and kinesthetic and so on.
But I think one's learning orientation can be change easily depending on particular situation.
So I just wanna tell you I'm a lonely boy! What that means?

I usually do work by myself. Assignments, projects, presentations, and everything. I never enjoy working with any other people. I think even the outcome of any tasks is better when I do by myself than when doing with others.

my reading strategy

I tried to check my reading strategies through the checklikst given in the clss.
Since the page did not provide the result of the test, I just marked the checkbox and counted by myself.
Only a finding is the number of checked list is greatest in "During reading strategy".
and... nothing! That's all!





http://englishnet.or.kr/class/L2Reading/Reading_Strategy_Checklist.htm

Plan your days!

The topic of journal for this week is the plan of mine. Prof. Kim required us to explicit our 10-year-after career goal. To be honest, It's not easy question for me cause that question is the reason why I have beeen through these tough days. I just mention here two options.
1. to be a teacher?
2. to get another job.
The latter doesn't limit the range of variables while the former asks me to be a teacher.

10-year-study plan

I worked with this "plan" as part of an assignment and the final outcome of course came out !
But as you know, it's written in Korean. :)
So I just posted summary of that. In the "macroplan" part which is the 10-year-after goal, I set up 3 goals.
1. Bookworm
2. Be stylish!
3. Do actively!

Treasure Hunt!

start from the website below.
http://www.vladimirashkenazy.com/


find the treasure for three questions!

1. How many composers has he played so far, as a conductor?
25 composers

2. In autumn 2005, who did he take the Europe tour with?
NHK Symphony Orchestra

3. Where did he played Rachmaninov in 2002?
the Lincoln Center, New York.

The process of reading: three levels of description (Adapted from Lunzer et al. (1979))

Level 1	Level 2	Level 3
Decoding print	Identifying letters, words, phrases	Scanning, fixating, anticipating, categorizing, testing, matching, verifying
Making sense	Assigning meaning to phrases and sentences	Anticipating syntactic and semantic categories, matching, verifying
Questioning	Noting discrepancies between different statements or between what is read and what is known	Retrieving material from long-term memory, comparing, inferring

Gordon's (1982) three sets of competencies

Reading Skills development
Names of Letters Introduce words Consonants Vowels Sight words Blends Word division Consonant diagraphs	Vowel Diagraphs Silent letters Plurals Compound words Context clues Contractions Rhyming words Hard and soft ‘c’ and ‘g’	Root words Prefix and suffix Synonyms Antonyms Homonyms Multiple meaning Pronunciation key Word definitions
Reading comprehension development
Categorizing Sequencing Follow directions Read for facts Retell story Main idea Key words	Summarize Predict outcomes Recognize emotions Make inferences Reliability of source Compare and contrast Make judgments	Figurative language Literary forms Evaluate characters Evaluate settings Factual conclusions Fact, fiction, and opinion
Reading research and study skills
Alphabetize Table of contents Dictionary skills Encyclopedia	Classify books Information from various sources Use of glossary	Atlases, maps, graphs Cross-referencing Use of index

The reading skills which I don't use

I realized that I've used only a few skills when I read any kind of text.

study goal of this year

Since I'm not so greedy person I've set just two plans for this year.
1. getting "computer utilizing ability" certificate
2. studying English harder.

that's so simple huh? ;)

miscellaneous collection for Romero

about author: Dagoberto Gilb
http://alkek.library.txstate.edu/swwc/archives/writers/gilb.html

interview with Gilb
http://www.pitt.edu/~nidus/archives/fall2002/gilb.html

the book which has something to do with the novel
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:78081

a kind of review from someone's blog
http://thexenofiles.blogspot.com/2007/01/early-daysgood-damn-im-preachy.html

information about El Paso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paso%2C_Texas

1 mile = 1.609344km

location of El Paso
http://maps.yahoo.com/;_ylc=X3oDMTExNmIycG51BF9TAzI3MTYxNDkEc2VjA2ZwLWJ1dHRvbgRzbGsDbGluaw--#mvt=m&lat=31.762376&lon=-106.476851&mag=11&q1=El%20Paso%2C%20TX%2C%20United%20States

about the name of "Romero"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romero

language skills

(in language teaching) the mode or mannaer in which language is used. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are generally called the four language skills. Sometimes speaking and writing are called the active/productive skills and reading and listening, the passive/receptive skills. Often the skills are divided into subskills, such as discriminating sounds in connected speech, or understanding relations within a sentence.

Jack C. Richards, Richard Schmidt., Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p.293

teacher's pronunciation?

Thesedays many midleschool or highschool students think their English teacher's pronunciation should be perfect and even judge their language ability just by their accent.
When it comes to my position, I am also trying to have "native-like" accent as far as I can.
But here's the thing. As English become more internationalized, we should accept the variety of it.
English is no longer English-speaking countries' own.
There are thousand of millions of people who use English as many purpose as their numbers.
Austrailian English is English. Singaporean English is also Englsih and so forth...
Can you just devaluate the quality of English teacher who has Korean accent?
Never do such a ridiculous misjudgement!

L1 reading vs. L2 reading

Many people and reasearches said there are a relationship between reading and L2 reading. I would say I agree with that suggestion.

daily reading - the very first attempt!

I have already, believe it or not, decided to read any kind of articles regulary from next month.
as I decided it, Prof. Kim asked me to do it as an assignment so I choose one news report from ABC news quickly.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4524005&page=1

kaleidoscope

Personality
"I like to observethe patterns and structures in language"
- You are a reflector who likes to notice and think about things for yourself before acting. You probably learn best by analysing the language, and you set yourself very high standards. This is good, but don’t worry too much about being completely perfect or you’ll never open your mouth. Relax a little and focus on communication.

Motivation
"I've never been a good language learner"
- You are not motivated to learn because of your beliefs about yourself as a learner. Where do these beliefs come from? Could it be that you have depended too much on external judgments of your skills? Or that in a different learning context you might be more successful? Try to look at your beliefs and understand where they come from. A fresh start or a new way of learning might have altogether different results.

Analytical and Communicative!

those are my learning styles!; among four different styles, I got the same result on these two items.

Analytical learning style
Focus on specific problems and proceeds by means of hypothetical-deductive reasoning; object-oriented; independent; dislikes failure; prefers logical, didactic presentation.

Communicative learning style
Fairly independent; highly adaptable and flexible, responsive to facts that do not fit; prefers social learning and a communicative approach; enjoys making decisions.

and the others are:
Concrete learning style and Authority-oriented learning style.

INFJ? or INTJ?

I already took a test of MBTI one year ago. At that time, the result was INTJ.
After a year, it is changed to INFJ.

See below addresses:
INFJ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INFJ
INTJ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ

interaction while reading

There are many strategies and skills of reading foreign-language texts. As I've learned so far, those skills/strategies interact each other when the learner is reading any kind of texts. In that sense, I thought about my reading habits. What skills do I use?
I concluded It depends on the type of the text and the purpose of reading. For example, when I read textbook for preparing *quiz* something, I always read along the bottom-up processing and spend all the time to understand every word, sentence, and whole paragraph and try to memorize all of them. In the case of reading for killing time, on the other hand, I usually do skimming and read in perspective to catch out the main theme and whole meaning.
And the truth is that these stratigies are often used at once.

MBTI result

Your Type is INFJ

Strength of the preferences %

Introverted 11
Intuitive 50
Feeling 38
Judging 48

INFJ type description by D.Keirsey
INFJ Career Choices by Jung Career Indicator?
INFJ type description by J. Butt and M.M. Heiss

Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:
slightly expressed introvert
moderately expressed intuitive personality
moderately expressed feeling personality
moderately expressed judging personality

interactive processing

a theory of reading comprehension that sees reading as involving both the accurate and sequential understanding of text based on identification of the meanings of words and sentences in the text (i.e. BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING) as well as the experiences, background information, and predictions that the reader brings to the text (e.i. TOP-DOWN PROCESSING) Both kinds of processing are involved and they modify and act on each other.

Jack C. Richards, Richard Schmidt., Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p.265

top-down processing

in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, and INFORMATION PROCESSING, a contrast is made between two different ways in which humans analyze and process language as party of comprehension and learning. One way, known as top-down processing, makes use of "higher level", nonsensory information to predict or interpret "lower level" information that is present in the data. The other way, bottom-up processing, makes use of the information present in the input to achieve higher level meaning. The meanings of these terms varies depending on the unit of analysis. For example, in word recognition, the higher level information is knowledge of permissible words as well as actual words of a language, while the lower level information is the actual phonetic input (or orthographic input in the case of written word recognition). In sentence comprehension or the interpretation of an UTTERANCE, the lower level information is words, while the higher level information includes knowledge of GRAMMAR, SEMANTICS, and PRAGMATICS. As applied to the full understanding of a novel, lower level information consists of words and sentences, while higher level information includes the reader's previously existing knowledge of the world, including cultural and moral values, SCRIPTs, SCHEMAs, and literary GENREs.

Jack C. Richards, Richard Schmidt., Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p.567

teacher-wannabe?

To be an English teacher is never easy for non-native speaker, especially me who is not good at English. So I still cannot sure wheter teaching is my true calling. It may or may not.
Anyway, If I should be a teacher, I would try to be a good model to my students.
I really want to show the other people that it's possible to have near-native English competence even in Korea.

English Text?

I have always thought that there are a lot of letters everywhere so I would say the polluted and overflowing characters around me may contaminate my brain. Now I got suprised as I am to find what kind of English text I usually see/read.

▶ textbook; who protects! I am junior. lol
▶ commercial sign; looks like hell.
▶ interface(menu) phrase of cell phone;
...

of course, there are much more things than them.

What matters is not whether it's written in Korean or English. However, I should think about it seriously. Can reading/seeing a text be called helpful way of learning language?

comprehension questions 3/11

Q: What makes you English reading difficult?

In my case, grammatical structure would be a problem. I become uncomfortable and cannot read much faster than usual reading speed, when I encounter some sentences which have unfamiliar and complicated structure.

and more, "vocabulary" and "social background"

Q: Explain each term of "Reading Process" - because of some reasons, I just explained these terms with short words.

Schema; (we skipped this term cause we all already knew it)

Shared assumption; b/g knowledge, attitudes, social b/g, language, etc...

Presupposition; unstated things

Prediction; assumption before reading

qualifications to be an English teacher in Korea

though professor just asked us five or more items, I added one more condition; "Korea".
I've thought that ESL or EFL condition should be considered with more concern....
What is more, among these particular conditions, Korea has unusual... education context.

1. passion
2. understanding of this particular situation(i.e., everyone in Korea seems to be mad at English lol)
3. of course, English skills
4. sense of morality
5.