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 !!