Welcome Freshmen!

And again, hey everyone!

This post goes to every guy or girl out there, who is planning to come to the University of Groningen to study.
Let my say one thing in advance: If you think your English is brilliant and you don't need to take an English course AGAIN, go to Google, tip in "academic wordlist" and read. If you still think you don't need this course, you can read my other posts and don't worry about my advice. If you think you might want to hear my advice, you better stay and listen.

When I came here to study, I thought my English might be sufficient...to have conversations, talk about random stuff or chatting with each other, yes. But academic English is not the English you know from school. Don't get me wrong, you can easily deal with academic English, I promise but... you have to study!!

Seriously, this course is helpful. It is not a course you just have to pass and afterwards you won't need it (like some others). This course is about English and how you apply it in an appropriate way to use it all around the world. Remember: You gonna be international, this means, you will talk to a large variety of people with different heritages. It could only be beneficial for you to use this opportunity to improve your English. Of course, sometimes you'll might think:"Ok why are we doing this now??", but in the end everything will contribute to better English skills.

• study the new vocabularies in the first place (best you can do)
• put effort in the assignments
• use the chance to ask (maybe for some grammar things you always wanted to know
• Have fun! this course don't want to bully you, it is a loose atmosphere which can be fun

So, use this chance and study hard, it will worth it, I promise.

First improvements!!

Hey everyone,

My first semester is almost over! In two weeks the second big exam weeks will start. However after them, my first semester at the University of Groningen is over. Time to analyze if I already made some improvements.

I remember my first presentation (already in my blog), I was really nervous and was not quite sure about what the teacher expects from me. It didn't take a long time to realize how important it is to be a good presenter and how much you have to practice. Fortunately, we got more than enough chances to practice and thus, constantly improve our soft skills.

When I see what I have reached within this short time span, I am curious about what I can reach in the next semester. Especially presentations are not longer something, about what I am scared or very nervous. On the contrary, I learned that presenting is sometimes even fun (if you are good prepared and interested in the subject you are talking about). Therefore to show you how my presentation skills have improved, I can present you the evaluation sheet of my first presentation and the evaluation of the last one. I think you can see some differences.

As you can see, I improved everything, structure, delivery and language. And I did not only improved my presenting skills, I also improved my vocabulary and grammar skills. In these two pictures, I uploaded my first and my last memo report to a Vocabulary Profiler, with which you can analyze your texts. You can see how many percent of your texts consists out of academic words, basic words and so on, check it out! As you can see, I improved the use of the academic words, which was one of m main aims.

This was my first memo report

This is my newest report

I hope I can retain this tendency, we'll see in some months.
I'll keep you up to date.

Have a nice day!

Memo Reports ?!

It's me again,
As already said in a previous post, 30% from our grade consists out of the so called "Memo Reports". To refresh your minds:

1. What is a memo report?

Put simply, a memo report is a brief report which is presented with a memo header:

To:

From:

Date:

Subject:

It is presented in the form of a memo because it is for internal communication purposes. In the context of your project, the consultant sees him/herself as temporarily affiliated to the company and, therefore, uses the memo format to stress his/her temporary insider status.

1. Memo and Memo Report the same?

No. A memo can be used for any kind of internal correspondence within an organisation. It may be very short and relatively informal. However, it is about to disappear because of the use of emails.

A memo report has a formal status. It is a means of briefly summarising complex information, using an explicit structure.

Meanwhile, we were already supposed to hand in both memo reports, which were obligatory. To give you a little impression about how they looked, here they are:

This was the first one. Graded with an indicative grade, the purpose of this report was to practice.

This was the first graded report

This is the newest one I just handed in.

What do you think about the reports, do you think writing those is a good exercise?

Our self-made product!

Good morning everyone,


Here it is, our self-made product line of the fictional cosmetics company "Hazel", "The two fase foundation". We were supposed to come up with a new product for this company, in order to improve sales and shift the target group of Hazel into a more young and modern light. 


Therefore we wrote a press release, which should be published to inform about the upcoming changes within the company. At the end, we also added some information about Hazel's current situation and further information about why changing the firms target group and product lines. This is our press release:

PRESS INFORMATION

LONDON, ENGLAND, November 25, 2011

New innovations by Hazel

Hazel Cosmetics recently has announced a series of brand new products, which should innovate and facilitate the use of skin foundation for teenagers and young women. The new product will aim on a specific target group that is, Teenagers and pre-teenagers at the age of 14-23.

“We are quite sure that this new product will constitute a huge help for young women, who are faced with the edge between the age of a teenager and the beginning to be a grown up”, said Mike Smith, Hazel’s Marketing manager. “We think this time and phase in the lives of young adults, is characterized by uncertainty, shown in their psychological interior and referring to this, their skin as well. We want to help by providing this new innovative product, the “Two Fase Foundation”, in order to improve both, the skin and hence, the self –confidence to manhandle this complicated phase in the life of a girl.”

The key factors of this brand new innovation are two effects, which team up to provide an optimal protection for the skin, and simultaneously, let the skin appear becalmed and vital look by still remaining its naturalness. The clue, once put on, the rich lotion will gives the skin sufficient moisture and care for the whole day, while the foundation delivers a young and fresh face by covering skin blemishes and diminishing the production of new ones.

The new “Fase Foundation” with its two side effect, will be acquirable in the shops starting in the beginning of December 2011. However, the sales will be firstly confined to the English market, in which the demand should be tested, whereas the selling is planed for a release out of the English market as well.

End

About Hazel:

For more than 50 years, Hazel, one of the world’s largest direct sellers of cosmetics and beauty products, is producing cosmetics, fragrances and toiletries for the global market. Nevertheless, the recent development since the 1990s describes a steady decline in Hazel’s sales. Nowadays, Hazel has got a small market share in products for teenagers and young women and is confronted with a further decline. Therefore, a new CEO has been appointed and a new strategy was set up combined with a series of new products.
Our Mission Statement:

Feel secure, a pretty and healthy skin at the same time with Two Fase Foundation.

As you can see, in our English course, we are supposed to connect our learning process with business routine as well. We learn how to write such reports, customer information and press releases. This is very useful, because you know how to structure those things when you are supposed to write a "real" one.

Check yourself!

Hey everyone!

In this post I want to show and provide you with some material, with which you can check your own English level. This could be very helpful, in order to know what you have to practice more and what is actually already quite good.

The first thing i want to show you is a self-check error list. With this sheet, you can evaluate some of your texts and search for mistakes you made. If you do that constantly, you can see improvements of your writing skills, which is very helpful.

Another thing i want to show you is the VocabularyProfiler (already mentioned in a previous post), with which you can check your written texts. You can proof how many words you used and how many of them are academic. There are 4 different kinds of word groups. K1,K2,K3 and Acadamic words.

Tip: To write nice texts, you should have the following percentage of these word groups: 70% K1 words, 10% K2,K3 and Academic words. So, check yourself!

Our graded presentation

Hey everyone!

After weeks of improving our presentation skills the last graded group presentation is due.

Every group consisted out of three people, who are supposed to give a 15 minutes presentations about a specific topic. The grade we will receive, counts for 25% of the whole end grade, thus, it is very important to put a lot of effort in it.

After some hours of analyzing, writing, and practicing, we finally finished our PowerPoint presentation about "Audiowire". Audiowire is a fictional company, selling headphones and other audio products. Due to a rather old and unattractive looking website, selling rates are getting bad. We are the consulting company "Online Experience" and are supposed to hold a meeting, in which we give our recommendations concerning improvements for the website, in order to raise selling rates.

Audiowire

In the meantime, we already hold our presentation and it went quite well. Due to we were the first team, nervousness was recognizable, although we already did so many presentations. However, in the end everything went well.

How did we practice for this presentation?

After collecting and writing all crucial information concerning the content of the presentation, we teamed up, in order to practice the whole presentation. With "we", i mean my colleagues Cem and Koen, with whom i hold the meeting. I provide you with a link to their blogs, just click on their names. To practice, we made up an audience, consisting out of two of our group, while the other one is presenting his part. This was a good way to think about supportive terms and pre choose suited words to present it the next day in class. Furthermore, these dry runs took away some uncertainties concerning how to present, and provided us with feedback to further improve.

Next day in class, the presentation was due. Despite the training, everyone was nervous. However, because we practiced before hand, everything was fluently.

This, was also because of our great audience, who gave us helpful and interesting feedback, to improve our mistakes and enhance the following presentation.

This is the evaluation sheet made by our teacher about the good and the bad things about my part within the presentation.

My Story!

Hey everyone!

In this post, I want to tell you my personal English learning history. That means, I want to tell you, which different experiences I made in my life with the English language. Furthermore, you will read something about the different steps towards the English level I obtain today.

As you might know or not, my home country is Germany, more precise, north Germany. I lived there for 16 years after we moved from Munich to a rather small city. I also visited the school there and this was of course my first contact with the English language. When I was in the third grade of the primary school, the school offered English the first time. We did not learn something about the grammar, it was more about some basic and easy words for instance, pronouns or some animals for example, bird, dog and so on. I did not have the luck to be raised bilingual, thus this was my first contact with a foreign language.

After leaving the primary school and entering the upper school system, it got more serious. English was all of a sudden one of the main subjects and became more difficult. I can remember my very first vocabulary test. It was about all the pronouns we were supposed to study. I failed this test with the worst grade you can get, because I underestimated the difficulty, due to my memory about some easy words we studied playful in the primary school.

I have to say that I was not that good during the first four years in the secondary school. After some bad grades in a row, I even took tutoring lessons. My problem was the grammar. Despite, I had a good participation in class, I failed a lot of grammar tests. This changed after I finished the ninth grade, due to a change in the exam system. The focus was shifted towards writing texts instead of dry grammar training. With the beginning of the tenth grade, I became better. English was now one of my favorite subjects.

At this time, many school colleagues left Germany for an exchange year. Unfortunately, I did not travel into another country like some colleagues did. Maybe because I did not feel ready for this, or I just was tied to my family and my familiar surrounding. I really should have gone into a different country I know that today. Nevertheless, I had no problems with English till I got my Abitur, the German school leaving examination.

After my school career, it was clear to me that I want to be more international. I had two ideas in my mind. The first one was to travel to Australia to have one year off and travel around there. The second was the idea to start studying abroad to broaden my horizon this way. At the end I decided to go to the Netherlands, because I thought that it would be even harder for me to start studying after a whole year off. Therefore, I became a member of the University of Groningen.

At first, I was not sure if my English skills were appropriate enough to handle a study path, in which I only talk English. However, after a time, I recognized that I do not have any problems with the language and that I am not worse than my colleagues who did have an exchange year. By entering the university, I thought my English is already sufficient enough. Therefore, it was very surprising to me that we got an extra subject called English for IBM. It turned out that this was very important because we totally underestimated business English. Academic English was something else than the Smalltalk English we obtained before. Hundreds of new vocabularies, we did not hear before challenged us. But studying them was worth it. Academic texts are easier for us to understand and we are able to write texts, which sound better and more appropriate.

I am looking forward to the next years of my study and I am curious about new experiences I will make in the upcoming years, concerning the English language. Am I going to travel around, living in another country or having an international surrounding? Don’t matter! English will be the last problem I would have. 

It was a good decision to go abroad, trust me.

First exams

O' sweet taste of student life, where are you ?!

After partying, finding friends and exploring the new surrounding, Groningen, two tough weeks try to challenge us! Two weeks of exams, our firsts!

Go in and win !

This entry should especially treat the already mentioned English exam. How should i study? How could this exam looks like? Will it be easy or hard? These questions were in my head, as I thought about an the first English grammar/vocabulary exam since years. I am able to speak and write English, so why such an exam ?! 

However, after a few weeks of attending lectures, tutorials and talking to colleagues, you can get a good impression about what it is like to use ACADEMIC ENGLISH.

An expression i was not aware of before. This is why this English exam is quite important they told us. Academic English is something different, seems to be an very different dialect of the English language. Therefore, this exam is a good incentive to start learning this dialect.

But how to study? And what??

There are two ways to prepare:

1. Practice
2. Preparation

1. Practice: Fortunately, our teachers provided us with a mock exam, in order to get an impression about the stuff required and the chance to practice and evaluate our status quo. This mock exam embodied the same structure as the "real" exam and provided us a good overview about how to study and what.
2. Preparation: After reading the mock exam, the preparation was clear, VOCABULARY! Just to give an impression about which vocabularies, this is a part of the AWL, the academic word list, we were supposed to know:

accommodate	commence	duration	mature	preliminary	sphere
analogy	compatible	erode	mediate	protocol	subordinate
anticipate	concurrent	ethic	medium	qualitative	supplement
assure	confine	format	military	refine	suspend
attain	controversy	found	minimal	relax	team
behalf	converse	inherent	mutual	restrain	temporary
bulk	device	insight	norm	revolution	trigger
cease	devote	integral	overlap	rigid	unify
coherent	diminish	intermediate	passive	route	violate
coincide	distort	manual	portion	scenario	vision

Now, after studied these (and the other 550) words, some of them sound not that difficult anymore. But imagine, you were sitting in front of a sheet of paper, in which they ask you these kind of words without hearing some of them in your whole life.....

Nevertheless, the preparation of this list had indeed a beneficial effect on my english, i am glad that i studied them in the first place.

Besides studying vocabulary, it was crucial to refresh certain basic grammar rules, such as cohesive words and train to read texts while answering question about those.

In the end, the exam was nearly the same in structural terms and was challenging for everyone.

Well, I passed the exam with a seven! Quite good in my opinion, however i still have to study enough.

But you'll know, you read my blog, aren't you?

Take it easy,

Louis

To provide some exercises and impressions about the exam, i uploaded a mock exam and a grammar exercise we got to study for the exam, have fun!

English Mock Exam

a grammar exercise

Upcoming challenges

How is the final English grade evaluated??

First of all, the final English grade at the University of Groningen consists out of a variety of assignments, presentations and also a English vocabulary exam.

Weights, which evaluate the final grade are as follows:

two memo reports:                             30%

exam:                                                 25%

presentation:                                      25%

                       LLB and blog review presentation      20%

What is a memo report??

A memo report, as the name already says, is a written report about a meeting we are supposed to set up in class. This meeting should include a discussion about a certain case, which is stated in our English material. Therefore, our task is to personalize a certain party in a collaboration or a company, and discuss about upcoming changes, decisions and plans. In order to give recommendations to the board of directors, we write a report about this meeting, the memo report.

We are supposed to create two of those, each counts 15%.

What is the presentation about??

In addition to the two memo reports, we have to hold a graded presentation about one of the three cases treated in class. This presentation is a group presentation. Thus, a group of three people prepare such a presentation. 

Blog review? LLB???

Another important part of our grade is, obviously, this blog and all it contains. The "LLB" stands for a language learning history, which is also part of this blog at the end. As i already mentioned in my first blog entry on 24 October, this blog should reflect my learning progress within this course year. At the end of the first semester, we are supposed to present our blog to our classmates.

The exam!

What is also due is a vocabulary exam in the middle of the first semester. I will provide an extra entry about this exam, because it is not as easy as it sounds!

Hopefully, i can obtain all necessary percentages to reach a sufficient and satisfying grade at the end.

A lot of work though!

LET'S DO IT !!

My first presentation !

How to avoid overloaded text slides ?!

 Everybody knows the problem: How to provide enough information to your ordinance so that everybody understands? Well, easy! Just generate five slides, put all information in it, show it to your classmates and let them read, done! STOP! Don't you think you would bore them ?! Don't you think that after two minutes everybody in the room would fall asleep? You can do it better !How? Watch this!

Five way to transform your overloaded text slides

This was the evaluation of my first presentation:

1 presentation

Hope you guys can apply these tips to your next presentations! They will help for sure Have a nice day, Louis

My goals for this course!

Especially for my studypath IB&M it is not sufficient to just be able to talk english with the purpose to mantain proper conversations. Referring to my opinion it is also important to have a advanced and broad vocabulary especially at an academic english level. If you don‘t have the crucial english skills for reading business reviews or listening to lectures or symposiums which ,expect advanced academic english, you can‘t fullfil personal and academic expectations. Moreover, it is very important to keep learning, studying and improving your english skills not only for your studytime, but also for post university activities. With the international background of your education, you can be sure that you‘ll have to deal with an international surrounding as well.

In reference to this opinion, I hope I can use this course to improve my english in terms of my communicative, writing and presenting skills. 

When I evaluate my level of english dominance, I think I have to improve my grammar skills together with understanding the use of specialized terms in order to learn how to work in an international field and ambience.

• Go out and speak!
• Pronunciation
• Vocabulary
• Grammar

This is my Blog!

Hi, my name is Louis, i am an IB&M student at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and this is my blog.
This blog should reflect my improvements during the first year in my bachelor program. I will post regularly to provide my followers with current results, interesting documents and informations about the daily life here in Groningen and at the university.
I hope you enjoy reading this blog!
Give also feedback in order to improve it constantly.

Have a nice Day,
Louis

Always desire to learn something useful.
Sophocles