Hello! I'm Clever Apple ! !
Today, I will write about my study at Wollongong university in Australia.
Today's topic is "UOW College".
I took this photo in Kiama, about 3.40 minutes by train from Wollongong.
It's interesting that Kiama is pronounced like Kayama!
Check out this article for the first part of my experiences at UOW College!
■Please also see this!■
The ETS (English for Tertiary Studies) course of UOW College I took has two classes: Academic Reading/Writing (ARW) and Academic Listening/Speaking (ALS) !
I would like to introduce how these classes were like!
1. Academic Reading/Writing (ARW)
The first subject is the Academic Reading/Writing (ARW) class!
This subject accounts for 60% of the course grades, and you will basically learn about the academic essay writing required for the university or graduate school course you are going to !
You can learn not only about the structure of essay, but also how to use databases, paraphrasing , the concept of critical thinking, citations, basic grammar, vocabulary, expressions that can be used in writing, and how to use auxiliary verbs. All of these skills are necessary for academic writing!!
This subject consists of regular quizzes , research that is done with the teacher and friends, and a final 1000words essay. These tasks account for 20, 50, and 30% respectively!
The quizzes are mainly about the grammar and sentence structure learned in the class, and you need to review the contents of the class to get a good score.
The research involves practicing supporting/disagreeing on various topics based on evidence, analyzing example essays, and dividing them into an introduction, main body, and conclusion.
For a student like me who has never written essays in English, a 1000 word- essay is a lot. However, you don't write everything by yourself, and you can consult with your teacher and get help from other students to finish it, so it's not that hard and you can enjoy learning how to write an essay.
By the way, the theme of the last essay was " Is social media useful or harmful for education?" , which is interesting!
In addition to being given some references to read, the essay assignment required me to search the database for papers that I could use myself.
Therefore, it included a practical process of searching for the papers I needed to write my own essay while referring to the papers I was given, and this experience is still useful today!
What I found particularly useful in this course was learning ( 1) how to do citations and ( 2) academic vocabulary!
As for ① citations , you can see a citation guide on the university website, but in this course, you can learn from the very basics steadily!
Regarding ② academic vocabulary, I felt that I had a hard time writing because I couldn't tell the difference between normal vocabulary and academic vocabulary !
In this course, you also learn these differences and paraphrasing, so you can use that knowledge for your university course!!
2. Academic Listening/Speaking (ALS)
The second subject is Academic Listening/Speaking (ALS) !
This course aims to improve basic listening and speaking skills.
Besides learning basic grammar, you use worksheets to solve listening questions and share your experiences with other students.
In the speaking activities with other students, you talk about experiences that changed your behavior and thoughts. I personally liked an activity where each student added words to a sentence to create a story . You can improve your speaking and listening skills while having fun.
3. Timetable
Finally, I will show my timetable of this course!
Here's what my course timetable looked like!
There are not the days of the week in the picture, but from the left, it's Monday to Friday!
A mistake I made in this course was that I worked part time!
I thought classes and assignments were like those at Japanese universities, so I took classes while working part-time at night. It was quite difficult to manage the schedule...
I asked other students, but none of them had a part-time job.
As a quick summary, the UOW College course was like this!
Although it is a little expensive and time consuming, it was a very good course to help me smoothly get used to the courses at the graduate school.
If I had not taken this course, I might have failed some of the subjects I took at the university....
Next time, I will finally write about my graduate school course, Master of Education (TESOL) ! !
May your study abroad be a wonderful one! !
