Hello everybody,
Today I wanted to make a few notes about my English 201 class and about my progress there. As you may know, this blog is a part of my English class too, so I may refer to my previous posts too.

Firstly, I would like to say that at the beginning this course seemed very unusual to me(also, like any other), because in high school the methods of  education were rather different. For instance, we focused mostly on classwork and all process heavily relied on the teacher, not on students ourselves. Also, the number and the length of lessons do make difference. Here, in university, English is taught in another way. The vast part of what we do is homework and different assignments now. I was attending school that had a language specialization, thus we had a lot of lessons. Currently, I have only two lessons pro week; however, it is not less difficult too study. I just wanted to evaluate that from my point of view two main principles of English 201 is to study by yourself, that means that everything relies on you mainly, and the second principle that we are attending that course mainly not to improve our language but to improve our reading, writing and oral skills.

For that moment, I think I've done quite a good progress in the skills I've outlined below. Of course, I should not forget about technical language: it has improved in a result of huge amount of English, too. Talking about reading and writing skills, I would like to notice that I did not know the standard 3-paragraph essay model at all, for instance. Learning that concept helped me not only in English course but also to write some essays in Economics and other f/w assignments. What I wanted to notice about readings we do, is that they are really interesting and sometimes touching. So they make myself to think about some problems, too. In addition, I've used some facts from "The Hidden Life of Garbage", the one of the essays we discussed at class, in my work on other subject. Oral skills are very important, too. Nevertheless, we had not already had any global oral projects or assignments, so I simply can not evaluate my progress in it. Though for tomorrow we have to prepare the *first draft* of our first speech in this course, so right afterwards finishing that post I am going to start preparing for it.

Actually, as I said previously and mentioned it in mid-term survey, grammar and vocabulary projects are not that important to me. However, thinking objectively, I do need them. The reason for such a dilemma is that grammar and vocabulary are my weak points. So I can read all the David's comments about grammar in my  formal writing assignment, fix all of them, move the most important in the grammar log and so on, but as soon as I upload grammar log to my.nes, I guarantee, I will forget everything. For me, the only way to improve grammar is to do a huge amount of exercises on it, that is what I was doing through all the 11 Grade at school and continue now, when I have a piece of free time, course. Vocabulary log is a good project itself; the only problem for me is to create an example of word usage from my head.

So, my goals for the next half of the semester remains quite the same: improve my reading ang writing skills, and separately overcome difficulties I have in speech. I think David does everything he can, so I should not be lazy and toughly work on myself. It also would be great, if you share your expierence in comments and correct me if I am wrong at something.

P.S. I really put my hands down trying to set a heading for my posts. I don't know what is the problem.