【L1】 【L4】

Study Activities in University
Good morning,
    Today we’ll look at some study activities carried out in the university. As we know, students in colleges or universities are expected to master some academic materials that are fairly difficult to understand. However, some of them find it hard to learn some complex, abstract or unfamiliar subject matter. As a result, a central problem in higher education is how to internalize academic knowledge, that is, how to make knowledge your own. In order to do so, we must convert knowledge from being other people’s knowledge to being part of our own ways of thinking.  Then, how are we going to do it? And what are the means available to help us in the process of learning? There are 4 key study activities currently used in higher education to encourage students to internalize knowledge. They are the ones we are familiar with: writing essays, going to classes and seminars, having individual tutorials, and listening to lectures. These 4 activities are long established features of our higher education and they are almost as important now as they were 100 years ago. Now let’s look at the features of them one by one.
    First, essay writing. The central focus of university work, especially in the humanities, for example, in literature, history or politics, is on students producing regular essays and papers which summarize and express their personal understanding of the topic. Then, what is good about essay writing? Firstly, writing essays forces you to select what you find interesting in books and journals and to express your understanding in a coherent form. Individual written work also provides teachers with the best available guide to how you are progressing in the subject and allows them to give advice on how to develop your strengths or counteract your weaknesses. Lastly, of course, individual written work is still the basis of almost all assessment in higher education. Written assignments familiarize you with the forms that your exams or course-work papers will take.
    The second key activity in colleges and universities is seminars and class-discussions. Their role is to help you internalize academic knowledge by providing specialized contexts so that you can talk about such difficult problems as the trade-off between inflation and unemployment in economic policy or the use of metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays. Talking is a more interactive activity than written work. In the conversation, you know immediately how effectively you are expressing a viewpoint and can modify what you are saying in response to people’s reactions. In addition, a normal program of between 10 and 25 classes will cover far more topics in one subject that you can hope to manage in your written work. Participating in flexible conversations across this range of issues also allows you to practice using the broard knowledge gained from other key activities, such as lectures.
    Now, let’s take a look at another activity—individual tutorials. Discussions between a teacher and 1 or 2 students are used in many colleges as a substitute for or supplement to group discussions in classes like those mentioned before.  Tutorials can range from direct explanations by the teacher in the subject to flexible conversational sections which, at their best, are effective in stimulating students’ mastery of the body of knowledge. The one-to-one quality of the personal interaction is very important in stimulating acceptance of ideas and producing fruitful interaction.  In order to make individual tutorials really work, students should make good preparation before hand and during the tutorial they should also ask questions to keep the ball rolling rather than let teachers talking in a vacuum.
    The last activity is lectures. As we all know, lectures play a large part in most students’ timetables and occupy considerable proportion of teachers’ efforts.  However, the major difficulty with lectures is that they are not interactive like discussions or tutorials.  The lecturer normally talks for the whole time with minimal feedback from questions. Besides, taking notes in lectures while concentrating on the argument being developed is often difficult to some students, especially when the argument is very complicated. However, having said that, lectures are clearly valuable in several specific ways.  They can provide a useful overview, an area map, as it were, to familiarize you with the main landscape features to be encountered during a course. Lectures typically give much more accessible descriptions of theoretical perspectives in their oral presentations that can be found in the academic literature. Whenever there is a rapid pace of progress in theory or practice, lectures play an indispensable part in letting students know the development immediately, usually several years before the new material is included in textbooks. Lastly, lectures are often very useful in allowing you to see directly how exponents of different views build up their arguments. The cues provided by seeing someone talking in person may seem irrelevant, but these cues are important aids to understanding the subjects better later.
    So far, we’ve discussed 4 study activities and their respective features and roles in higher education. Of course, study activities are not limited to just these four types. There are other activities that are equally important, such as general reading, project learning, etc. We’ll cover them during our next lecture.