March,2015 - April 2015
Mark Haddon
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"
esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks/curious.incident.of.the.dog/chapter_index.html
I've chosen this book to improve my vocabulary and also to be in touch with English, of course. Because I don't want to read books which I don't like I have to spend some time on the internet reading some reviews of books here https://www.goodreads.com/. It's a very useful website to choose a book which you could enjoy and this particular book has very good reviews. I was told by my teacher that it's more useful for improving my English to read books almost without using a dictionary so I have to admit that It would be difficult for me to read e.g. something by Dostoyevsky, because my vocabulary is not as good as it needs to be for reading these kind of books. I could use a dictionary, of course, but then it's not about reading but about looking up words in a dictionery! I think it's very well known that reading books is a good way how to improve your English and some of my teachers of English on the Skype told me that they have learnt English especially through reading. I don't want to claim that using a dictionary when you are reading a book is something bad, but we should be careful about using our dictionary too often.
Reflection:
Fortunately, I liked the book - its story so I enjoyed the time that I spent on it. Below is the list of vocabulary and phrases I didn't understand, but I have to say that most of them were not very important to me so I could understand the context of the book even without them. I didn't have problem with "grammar", I was able recognise tenses and sequence of tenses (It's quite difficult for me to use it e.g. during a conversation, but it's easy to understand it when I read a book or an article in a magazine). I didn't only make the list of vocabulary, I use an online software for learning the vocabulary www.englishme.cz/. In my opinion, it is the best software for learning vocabulary - it's easy to use it and mainly, the learning is really effective, at least for me. You can create your own lessons and it was what I did with the list below.
Both speeches, direct speech and indirect speech are used in the book very often so it was a big opportunity to revise them. To summarise this activity I'd like to say that it was very useful to read the book, because I could learn or revise some new words and consolidated my "grammar knowledge" (tenses, sequence of tenses, direct and indirect speech etc). To be honest, the most important think about reading is the feeling I do something for improving my English.
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More activities connected with reading:
Studying at university I have to read and learn many study materials for each subject (Grammar B, Practical Language B, Phonetic and Phonology, Didactics).
There is a subject named "English online" where I have to read many of my classmates' contributions and also on Moodlinka there are many contributions I'm supposed to read.
Below are some examples of my reading activities:
Peter Roach - "English Phonetics and Phonology"
Peter Roach - "A little encyclopaedia of Phonetics"
L.G.Alexander - "Longman English Grammar"
Clive Oxenden - "New English file Upper-intermediate Student's book"
www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/professional-competence-1
www.brightknowledge.org/knowledge-bank/teaching/my-job-explained-secondary-school-teacher
Building_Relationships_with_Students.
712educators.about.com/od/discipline/ht/class_manage.htm
