Journal for week 8

It has been a thrilling eight weeks time and obviously I’m half way through the course. Though the work is getting harder, I’ve been able to manage all four subjects pretty well. I think academic literacy is intended to build upon and expand our existing language skills while introduce them to a range of text and task types. There is a lot of progress in my language learning skills due to the wide range of assessment components. Many of us fail to present ideas more efficiently; but one of the most important things that I learned in this course so far are to identify, critically evaluate and respond to ideas in an accurate manner. Without a doubt the quality of written and spoken texts are improved and also I learned a lot of effective learning strategies as well.

Ted Talks and ABC radio national websites consist of vast information as a lot of professional speakers and professors have emphasized their view in different categories. This listening portfolio task helped me to improve my presenting skills and by commenting on them made me gain knowledge as well. Vocabulary assessment component was my favorite task and I learned lots of words and the meanings of them. Now I used to answer questions on vocabulary website during my leisure time and it really improves the knowledge of mine; this task was mind blowing one for me. Annotating poems and texts were also another brilliant task which helped me to think the ways of presenting ideas by famous authors and also I noticed the change of writing styles by the author’s generation to generation. DIIGO is the tool which was given to us and I think it’s not a reliable tool when it comes to annotating and I strongly suggest another tool to replace with it.

There are lots of learning outcomes from this unit so far and I honestly enjoy completing these tasks. I feel that the components inside assessment tasks should be reduced to a certain extent; hence the quality of the unit outline won’t get damaged. So that it will be easier to manage all the subjects. I suggest Swinburne to add this subject for foundation course. I’m really impressed about the unit outline because it includes a vast knowledge and the assessment tasks are well chosen by the unit convener.