IE Core 3 Friday: Lesson 8

Hi everyone,

We are officially half way through our course. We'll be quite busy in June with our presentations and Book Report #2, but July will not be as busy. Work hard for the next few weeks, and you can have a bit of a break in July.

Vocabulary Building:
During speed discussion, I demonstrated vocabulary collocation (=learning vocabulary in groups). Instead of making lists of words, it's better to make a group of words that are connected to the same topic. In this way, you can remember vocabulary more easily. For example, you can have this group of words connected to the word "smoking":

smoking --> causes cancer
smoker / non-smoker
--> first-hand smoke/second-hand smoke

Make sure you note down the vocabulary from speed discussion and from your discussions each week.

Presentations:
We continued with learning about presentations. In today's lesson, we learned how to use visuals. There are a variety of visuals that you can use for your presentation:

1. Graphs: vertical/horizontal bar, pie, line graphs
2. Pictures: photos, illustrations, diagrams, maps
   
3. Charts: title, overview, bullet, flowchart
   

We also learned how to explain graphs and maps. When you explain a graph, use the following steps:

1. Introduce the chart.
2. Explain the chart.
3. Emphasize what is important on the chart.
   

All of our presentation handouts from class today can be found in the Presentation section of the website.

PresentationsAll of our presentation handouts from class today can be found in the Presentation section of the website.
Discussions:
For next week's discussions, remember these points:

1. Transitions. Use transitions to connect your discussions. When you want to end one section of your discussion, you can say "Well, that's it for ... Let's move onto ..." (e.g. Well, that's it for my summary. Let's move onto my opinion.)
2. Titles. Be careful when using titles in English. Like Japanese, in formal situations, you use the family name. For men, you add Mr., and for women, you add Ms. (e.g. Mr. Suzuki / Mr. Jones / Ms. Suzuki / Ms. Jones). The titles Miss (for single women) and Mrs. (for married women) are not used in professional situations since a woman's marital status is private information. For university instructors, you should use the title "professor" (e.g. Professor Suzuki) unless you instructor has told you to call them by another name.
   

Homework:
1.  Blog Post #8
2.  Discussion Preparation
3.  Read Graded Reader (15 pages)
4.  Journal Topic #7: your future goals
5.  Presentation outline

• submit Monday, June 1 by 12:00 noon to ntakeda.aogaku@yahoo.com
  

Blog Question #8:

Give your opinion on your presentation's social problem and recommend two solutions.

Example:
In my opinion, suicide is an important social issue facing Japanese society. One reason for Japan's high suicide rate is because of the lack of awareness about mental health issues and the lack of services for those with mental illness. One solution is to ... Another one is to ...

• Write 8-10 sentences.
• Use capitalization, punctuation & spelling correctly.
• Submit by Thursday, May 28 by 6:00pm.