PhilosophersNotes - Get Your Wisdom On

PhilosophersNotes - Get Your Wisdom On This is an awesome resource!

Mind Maps

Many of you at Bilkent are being asked by your teachers to create semantic maps as part of your vocabualry study. I would like to offer a new way to approach the semantic map which I think will make them much more effective. This new approach is to use the mind map technique which was invented by Tony Buzan, a well-reknowned education technologist. I have included some videos of this method. THey are quite short and explain this simple but revolutionary technique. The strength of this technique relies on the way we remember anything, through a process of imagination and association. Those words or ideas that we have adequate association with in our minds are those which we most readily recall. His big idea for learning and remembering new vocabulary is to draw a small multicolored picture which we personally associate with a word. Tese pictures become part of the map and allow us to connect that word to other concepts based on the way we organize the map. Similar to creating your own sentence with a word, the act of drawing a picture which explains the word to you will insure that you not only understand the meaning but can remember it when you need it for reading, listening, speaking or writing. I have posted two examples to the top of this writing which give you an idea of how you can make your own. I have used this technique in my own study of less common academic words and found it to be quite useful. Those of you who like to draw like me may even enjoy it. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Vocabulary Study

I want to address this post to a great weakness among most of the students I have come across in my years at Bilkent, vocabulary. This is quite normal as the amount of vocabulary that students need to succeed in an academic environment is quite large. Learning of this nature requires a disciplined approach that a students can follow through with. First, the most natural way of buidling and reinforcing vocabulary is reading. This means finding books and articles that the students enjoys and wants to read. In the course of this, students will reinforce learning of words they already know and pick-up some new words that they don't. If you as a student want to improve your vocabulary, go find something enjoyable to read in English. With the Internet, you can find something on anything, so you have no excuse. As you may have heard, Google will probably in the near future be able to give you access to any book found in a library through its massive book scanning project. Second, the internet has lots of resources for learning vocabulary, such as this website about the 1000 most common words in English, http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm . Familiarizing yourself and using them on a regular basis can add some variety to your vocab study. Thirdly, along those lines, I want to draw your attention to the Academic Word List, http://www.academicvocabularyexercises.com/ .This list is a compilation of the most frequently used words in academic English, so learning these goes a long way when it comes to covering your academic vocabulary needs.
No one way of learning works for everyone. Each of you need to find what works for you and work it. This generally include reading and some daily focused study such as with vocabulary exercises, vocabualry journal work, flash cards and so forth. I will address the issue of creating and using a vocabulary journal in the next post next week. In the meantime, feel free to sign up for this blog so I can get the next post out to you.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. I am a Bilkent teacher who wishes to share what he has learned from his years of experience both as a Bilkent teacher and as an expert learner. On this blog, I will be sharing links, activites and ideas that I think will help you do more than pass your COPE exam, they will prepare you for your department of study at Bilkent. I expect to update this blog weekly so I hope you will visit regularly and spread the word about my blog to others who want to benefit from what I have to offer.