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SECTION D NOTE-TAKING AND GAP-FILLING
Good morning, today well look at some study activities carried out in university as we know, students in colleges or universities are expected to master some academic materials that are fairly difficult to understand. However, some of them find it hard to learn some complex, abstract or unfamiliar subject matter. As a result, a central problem in higher education is how to internalize academic knowledge, that is, how to make knowledge your own. In order to do so we must convert knowledge from being other's knowledge to being part of our own way of thinking.
Then how are we going to do it? What's the means available to help us in the process of learning? There are four key study activities currently used in higher education to encourage students to internalize knowledge. They are the ones we are familiar with: writing essay, going to classes and seminars, having individual tutorials and listening to lectures. The four activities are long-established features of our higher education, and they are as important now as they were a hundred years ago. Now let's look at the features of them one by one.
First, essay writing. The central focus of university work, especially in humanities, for example in literature, history or politics, is on students' producing regular essays or papers which summarize and express their personal understanding of the topic. Then what is good about essay writing? Firstly, writing essays forces you to select what you find interesting in books and journals and to express your understanding in the coherent form. Individual written work also provides teachers with the best available guide to how you are processing in the subject, and allows them to give advice on how to develop your strengths or counteract your weaknesses. Lastly, of course, individual written work is still the basis of almost all assessment in higher education. Written assignments familiarize you with the form of your exams or course what papers will take.
The second key activity in colleges and universities is seminars and class discussions. Their role is to help you to internalize academic knowledge by providing specialized contexts so that you can talk about such difficult problems as the treat of between inflation and the unemployment in economic policy or the use of the metaphors in Shakespeare's plays. Talking is a more interactive activity than written work. In the conversation you know immediately how effective you are in expressing your point and can modify what you are saying in response to people's reactions. In addition, a normal program of between 10 to 25 classes will cover far more topics than one subject. Then you can hope to manage your written work. Participating in flexible conversations across this range of issues also allows you to practice using the broader knowledge gained from other key activities such as lectures.
Now let's take a look at another activity, individual tutorials. Discussions between the teacher and one or two students are used in many colleges as a substitute for or supplement to group discussion in classes like those mentioned before. Tutorials can range from direct explanation by teacher and subject to flexible conversational sessions which at their best very effective in stimulating students' mastery of body of knowledge. The one-to-one quality of the personal interaction is very important in stimulating acceptance of ideas and producing fruitful interaction. In order to make individual tutorial really work, students should make good preparation beforehand, and during the tutorial they also should ask questions to keep the ball rolling rather than let the teachers talk the vacuum.
The last activity is lectures. As we all know, lectures play a large part of most students' timetable and occupy considerable proportion of teachers' efforts. However the major difficulty with lectures is that they are not interactive like discussion or tutorials. The lecturer normally talks for the whole time with minimal feed-back from questions. The signs making notes the lecture well-concentrating on the argument being developed is often difficult to some students, especially when the argument is very complicated. However, we have said that lectures are clearly valuable in several specific ways. They can provide a useful overview in every map, as it were, to familiarize you with the mainland features to be encountered during the course. Lectures typically give much more accessible descriptions of theoretical perspectives in their oral presentations that can be found in the academic literature. Whenever there is a rapid pace of progress in theory or practice, lectures play an indispensable part in letting students know the development immediately, usually several years before the new material is included in textbooks. Lastly, lectures are often very useful in allowing you to see directly how exponents of different views build up their arguments. The cues provided by things someone talking in person may seem irrelevant, but these cues are important aids to understanding the subject matter better later.
So far we've discussed four study activities and their respective features and roles in higher education. Of course, study activities are not limited to just these four types. There're other activities that are equally important, such as general reading, project learning, etc. We will cover them during our next lecture.
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