Last week we decided to divide our write-to-learn process into 3 stages. And during our first stage out main concern is to write something grammatically right. I should say it is good for most of you to have finished your writing in so short a period of time.
But as to the quality of our writing, we still have a long way to go.
As I told you last time, either in class, or through our writing web page—hudong.com, that we should try “any means” that you could think of to guarantee a correct writing. And I suggested editing our writing by a Microsoft Word. But it seems that most of us fail to follow my advice. hence the grammar of our writing is fairly poor.
Accordingly, I have decided that, for the time being, our primary attention shall be directed to the verbs we are using. In English, we can only use one verb in one single sentence. If we want to use more, try using the non-predicate forms of them.
Or we can put them in different clauses.
Now let’s look at an example:
This article is very long has 1198 words and 16 paragraph, so when I read it I feel very hard, .....
The verbs marked in red need improvement.
Tips for using a verb:
Just count the verbs in a sentence.
The subject/agent of verb(the person, the number)
The tense;[past, present, future(continuous, simple, perfect)]
The voice—passive or active;
The mood—a fact(indicative, simple statement or question ),
a command / request(imperative :),
or the speaker’s attitude(subjunctive – a statement contrary to fact, a wish, a mandative statement)
Because in Chinese we don’t have to pay any special attention to the change of forms of a verb, this difference between the two languages causes us great inconvenience. We always have to keep in mind this difference before our writing. And it is also an effective way to enhance our grammar.
The second thing I’d like to remind you is that at present we are in fact learning to record our reading process—namely, what is in our mind when reading a passage in English. What you have to do is try your best to tell me that you are reading a particular English passage, that you are trying to understand it, and that you really get something of your own after the reading.
But from the writing you have posted I can’t find much information I want. Everyone is saying something universally right, without any specific necessity to read the passage in our textbook.
The following example is such one of those with the least grammatical errors:
Everyone wants to live a happy life and find happiness at every turn. Actually, happiness is all around us in our daily life. In my opinion, traveling and listening to the music can engender a feeling of happiness. A supportive network of friends is a great source of happiness. Helping others makes us feel useful and happy.
We don’t see much relevance between the writing and our reading passage.
Still, most of us don’t meet our requirement of the length of writing. One of the reasons might be that we don’t have so much to say. The problem is that we fail to pay attention to the ‘sound of our mind’—usually the voice uttered from our mouths is the sound of our mind and spirit. It seems that we are silent when we our mouths don’t work. But it is surely not the case. Our mind is always racing. Try catching it with our words. Then we will have much to write—maybe too much for us to write down. And I believe after some time of practice, it will prove useful to help forget our mother tongue when writing in English.
In short, we are trying to record with words our reading process with the least grammatical errors as possible.
It has been universally acknowledged that
What we hear, we forget. What we see, we remember. What we do, we understand/learn.
According to Krashen, (Krashen, Stephen D. Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use p73)
It may be the case that reading is useful to us only when it is relevant to a problem we are working on, when it helps us gather information for preparation or verification. When we read selectively to help us solve a problem, we remember what we read. When we read material that is irrelevant, we don't remember it.
You read the first paragraph on the first page and, stimulated by what you read, get an idea: incubation has taken place. This is good. This is the purpose of school-new learning. ideally, you should stop reading and write the idea down…. The problem, in other words, is that incubation and illumination occur beyond our conscious control and can happen any time.
Studies also show that answering comprehension questions is more effective in promoting learning than requiring multiple- choice responses (Anderson and Biddle, cited in Langer and Applebee 1987).
For this week’s writing,
1.read the first page of the text, and decide something to write on. You need to “comment” on My writing first so as to let me know that you have finished your assignment. And remember to store your writing in a txt file in case you "lose" your writing(orbe deleted by someone else)
2. Choose one item written by your classmates and do peer evluation.
I expect your assignment to be done by Sunday.
