Great news – I made a final submission in the academic writing support group!
As I have written before, the academic writing task has given me quite much trouble. I had a tough time trying to write a good argumentative text and I didn’t really comprehend the task altogether. However I did submit a first draft and received feedback on it a while ago. The feedback was mainly about the cohesion and coherence of the structure as well as their impact on the arguments themselves. I went through it, revisited the examples and the teaching videos about the subject and managed to correct the essay to a much better form. During the process I used a few new tools I’ve been introduced to, like the grammarly.com website which spots the grammatical errors within a text. It proved to be very useful, although I’m still not very certain of proper punctuation in English.
The essay project has been very beneficial for learning, not only academic writing but also reading academic articles and texts. I think I am getting better at getting the information needed and the most important information out of academic texts, which certainly is a win. For the essay I have researched subjects like geodiversity, biodiversity, ecology and ecosystem services. Now that the subjects are listed it sounds like much, especially considered how I read through multiple articles on each subject! Honestly I think this can only do good for me, as these subjects are very interesting to me and I hope to do my bachelors thesis somewhere around these areas of studies.
I have also met with some EGEA travellers from Berlin in Helsinki and spent a couple of hours learning English in a social setting. EGEA is an acronym for European Geographers Association and it is a great way to keep all European geographers in contact with each others.
The learning has been very fruitful and I think my goals for next week are quite clear to me as well. I will start reading a book in English and I will get started with grammatical exercises – this will be very useful especially for my upcoming IELTS test! I will also keep on reading the news in English every morning and watching documentaries. Might be that I will take a habit on listening to TED talks too, but that I’m not yet sure of.
All in all ALMS is going very well and at the moment I’m very glad I chose this method of completing the English course. The best part is the support given by the teachers and that how the course can be tailored to fit my learning needs.
Now I will have a little holiday for the rest of this week and I will be back next week!