May Day Holiday, final exams, "improving your oral English" lecture, and off tomorrow for a week in Beijing!

(I haven't posted almost a month!  I knew it was a while ago, but this is too long.)

 

My May Day Holiday wasn't much to write home about:  ALIAS TV show marathon and then I spent the rest of vacation being sick, which was not cool.  And now I have the so-called "Changchun cough" because of the cold that I had, now almost a month ago.

 

I will have some pictures of the end-of-the-term English-language picnics that I had with my students up here in bit.  Oral exams were this week.  It was a definitely a test of who has any sort of English competency.  Students were graded on vocabulary, pronunciation, and fluency.  They all did fairly well and I am sure enjoyed an oral exam more than any written examination.  Being that these students have been studying English since they were young, their vocab is decent, but they lack in pronunciation and fluency, which they gain from listening to native-speakers and western films.

 

I was asked to give a lecture tonight on "How to Improve One's Oral English."  In conjunction, another foreign colleague addressed how to improve one's medical English.  I learned some new things from the other lecture.  (The other lecture also brought flashbacks to me from my medical terminology class freshman year and that bless-ed work book with 500 plus pages that had to be completed in one semester! Flash cards and the whole shebang.)  My lecture consisted of resources that could be utilized: media like CDs and DVDs; and a variety of internet sites like BBC, NPR, and Voice of America (VOA).  The students knew very little about their access to BBC and NPR, so I hope that they will use it more.

 

I am off to Beijing for a week, as of tomorrow night!  Classes are finished and I am going to travel, even if it just for a short time.  My summer plans are up-in-the-air, as of yet.  I might try to work in between my university contracts or I will head down to Guilin/Lijiang, as originally planned.  I will know within the next two weeks what the end result will be.  While in Beijing, I will check out the section of the Great Wall that is still natural (hasn't been re-built), Summer Palace, and Forbidden City.  I have a reservation to stay at a hostel in a "hutong" section (quaint alleys, essentially, but the English word "alley" doesn't do the description service, from what I hear).  My general schedule is to have one day of sight-seeing and then an off-day, which repeats itself three times.  I want to go see the behind-the-scenes part of Beijing in the off-days, just wandering around and checking out the city culture.  I am sure that I will return with some great pictures of Beijing!