Your task for this week is to learn ALL of the vocabulary for Unit 12 (Chance and nature) and Unit 16 (Materials and the built environment) and complete all of the remaining accompanying exercises. Much of it will be review, but please pay attention to sections (those other than topic vocabulary and word formation) that we did not cover last semester.
You've been learning collocations and idioms all semester, so now's the time to start testing to your knowledge. (No, idioms and collocations will not be direct questions on the exam, but they will greatly enhance your written work and you will thank yourself in Kompentenzerweiterung III next semester for investing time in learning C1/C2 vocabulary, when it will be crucial for producing quality output. This vocabulary is also indispensable for translation classes):
(Complete all of the exercises on the Oxford page by clicking on the individual links displayed.)
There will be two Zoom sessions this week (one on May 25th from 10-11 am for my Monday/Wednesday group and one on May 26th from 10-11 am for my Tuesday/Thursday group -- my apologies for the typos in my previous post) in which we will review the grammar points from the first half of this semester. The next Zoom sessions after this week will be offered at the following times:
Monday/Wednesday Group: Monday, June 8th from 10-11 am
Tuesday/Thursday Group: Tuesday, June 9th from 10-11 am
In these June sessions, we'll be doing work on vocabulary items covered in your book together. Attendance at Zoom meetings are optional. If you attend, please attend the meeting of your respective group (i.e. Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday). There will also be a normal post on this blog for next week. (The meeting ID and password for our Zoom sessions can be found in Week Seven's blog post. Please be advised that the first a zero starts both passwords, not the letter "o".)
Your optional essay topics for this week are:
1. US author Jonathan Franzen wrote a very influential (and controversial essay) for The New Yorker in which he as a conservationist asked whether climate change discourse might be doing conservationism no favors. (The article can be accessed here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture ) Your question therefore is (and make sure you know what conservation is when you answer this question): Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?
2. If you were to change one thing about housing in your town or city, what would it be? (Consider the content of this video, which outlines the housing challenges students are facing in the corona crisis (your response of course does not have to have anything to do with corona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3OJIX81Jg)
Choose one of the above questions for your optional essay of 250-350 words and submit it to me via email in an MS Word document by Wednesday, May 27 at midnight. Essays must meet the word-limit guidelines
and be submitted by the deadline in order to receive feedback. Since I will be doing the corrections by hand in the next couple of weeks and scanning back the results to you, please provide ample space (e.g. double space) between the lines of your essay so that I can write my corrections/remarks. Please also take the time to proofread what you've written BEFORE you submit it to me. At this stage of the game, I should not be correctly basic spelling errors and grammatical errors that I have drawn your attention to in previous corrections. Your goal should be to learn something NEW about your writing with each batch of feedback you receive from me.
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