2002年英语专业八级考试全真试卷（6）
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SECTION D NOTE-TAKING AND GAP-FILLING Study Activities in University Good morning, today we’ll look at some study activities carried out in universi t y. As we know, students in colleges or universities are expected to master some academic materials that are fairly difficult to understand. However, some of the m find it hard to learn some complex, abstract or unfamiliar subject matters. As a result, a central problem in higher education is how to internalize academic k nowledge, that is how to make knowledge your own. In order to do so we must conv ert knowledge from being other’s knowledge to being part of our own way of thin k ing. Then how are we going to do it? ?What’s? the means available to help us in t h e process of learning? There are four key study activities currently used in hig her education to encourage students to internalize knowledge. They are the ones we are familiar with: writing essays, going to classes and seminars, having indi vidual tutorials and listening to lectures. The four activities are long-establi shed features of our higher education, and they are as important now as they wer e 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 h umanities, for example in literature, history or politics, is on students’ prod u cing regular essays or papers which summarize and express their personal underst anding of the topic. Then what is good about essay writing? Firstly, writing ess ays 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 pr ovides teachers with the best available guide to how you are progressing in the s ubject, and allows them to give advice on how to develop your strengths or count eract your weaknesses. Lastly, of course, individual written work is still the b asis of almost all assessment in higher education. Written assignments familiari ze you with the form your exams 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 pro viding such contexts so that you can talk about such difficult problems as the treatment of inflation and the unemployment in economic policy or the use of the metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays. Talking is more active than written work. In conversation you know immediately how effective you are in expressing your point and can modify what you are saying in response to people’s reaction s . In addition，a normal program of between 10 to 25 classes covers far more topic s 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 practi se using the broader knowledge gained from other key activities such as lectures Now let’s take a look at another activity, individual tutorials. Discussi o ns between the teacher and one or two students are used in many colleges as a su bstitute for or supplement to group discussion in classes like those mentioned b efore. Tutorials can range from direct explanation by teachers and are subject to flexible conversational sessions which at their best are very effective in stimu lating students’ mastery of a body of knowledge. The one-to-one quality of the pe r sonal interaction is very important in stimulating acceptance of ideas and produ cing fruitful interaction. In order to make individual tutorial really work, st udents should make good preparation beforehand, and during the tutorial they als o should ask questions to keep the ball rolling rather than let the teachers tal k the vacuum. The last activity is lectures. As we all know, lectures play a large part o f most students’ timetable and occupy considerable proportion of teachers’ eff or ts. However the major difficulty with lectures is that they are not interactive like discussions or tutorials. The lecturer normally talks for the whole time wi th minimal feed-back from questions. The science and making notes and the lecture while-con centrating on the argument being developed is often difficult to some students, especially when the argument is very complicated. We have said that lectures are clearly valuable in several specific ways. They can provide a useful overview i n every map, as it were, to familiarize you with the mainland features to be enc ountered during the course. Lectures typically give much more accessible descrip tions of theoretical perspectives in their oral presentations than 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 include d in textbooks. Lastly lectures are often very useful in allowing you to see dir ectly how exponents of different views build up their arguments. The cues provid ed by someone talking in person may seem irrelevant, but these cues are i mportant 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 jus t these four types. They’re other activities that are equally important, such, a s general reading, project learning, etc. We will cover them during our next lecture 相关资料 |
