Kompetenzerweiterung II, Both Groups, Work for Week Two

Welcome to Week Two! I hope you're hanging in there alright and have enjoyed the miracle of the lovely weather in the past week. Before I list the tasks for this week, the following are a few suggestions / resources: 

- consider meeting up with a language buddy via Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, etc. during these weeks to keep your English speaking up to par. This might be with someone from our Komp I class, someone you know from your school days, etc. All the better if it's someone with whom you have a F1 or F2 in common, then you can practice both! If you need help finding a partner, send me an email (with your uni email address, please) and I can connect you with others who also in search of one (by sending me the email you are granting me the permission to pass your uni email onto another student). 

- if you are taking the Kompentenzerweiterung II exam in July for the second or third time, please get into contact via email with me as soon as possible. In these cases, I find it best to have a conversation about any concerns you have or challenges you might be facing with regards to the content. This will most likely take the form of a telephone conversation and be scheduled individually. 

- in several essays, I made comments on the following errors. Here are some resources concerning how to avoid them in future writing:
Avoiding run-on sentences: https://www.aims.edu/student/online-writing-lab/grammar/comma-splices
Formulating a strong, distinct thesis: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/thesis-statements/
Writing good topic sentences: https://wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/paragraphs-and-topic-sentences.html

Notice that all of these links come from university writing centers, a resource that anglophone unis tend to have. I recommend visiting their main pages and investigating what other resources they have in the form of advice, explanations and exercises (they often have video resources as well). 

Now onto our main tasks for the week. Please read the grammar pages on conditionals for Unit 11 and complete all of the exercises. I recommend reading your answers out loud when you are doing work on conditionals. It's one thing to be able to complete the exercises; it's another to be able to spontaneously speak in if-clauses in English (which is your goal). Learn ALL of the vocabulary for Unit 12 and complete all of the accompanying exercises. Please also do the exercises in the Unit 11-12 review as well.

The following is the design of July's exam: one gap fill exercise (all tenses and aspects + conditionals are fair game), one CLOZE exercise (the one-word-per-gap exercise), one word formation exercise (all of the word formation boxes from the book are fair game for the exam), one key word transformation exercise (the exercises that look like this: https://www.flo-joe.co.uk/fce/students/strategy/transfrm/compare2.htm ), one error correction exercise (I will give you a text that includes errors and ask you to proofread and edit the text), one gerund or infinitive exercise (I will give you the beginning of a sentence like "She pretended..." and you must complete it grammatically), and a 250-300 word essay.

The following are some extra exercises for conditionals (it is type 2 conditionals that German speakers often need the most practice with): 
https://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/151.html
https://www.eltbase.com/quiz/5061_01.htm
https://www.grammarbank.com/if-clauses-quiz.html
https://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/36.html
https://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/exercises/if_clauses/type_2_statements.htm
Here is englisch-hilfen's main page of all of their conditional exercises, sorted by type: https://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/exercises_list/if.htm

This video is a nice, quick review of conditionals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDoBdq0s8eY
And this one is good for mixed conditionals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mv7fBqauvc
The BBC Learning English channel is an excellent YouTube channel to subscribe to. 

The optional writing task this week will keep in the theme of nature and the environment introduced in Unit 12. There are three topics to choose from this week (on the exam, there will be two to choose from):
1. Watch the following video and introduce another sustainable invention that you have either seen in real life and of have dreamt up yourself that you think should be in more widespread use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Cc5zmy0eY&t=41s
2. The following video introduces the concept of biomimicry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMtXqTmfta0&t=39s How else can humans learn from nature?
3. If you were a minister for the environment, what policies would you put into place?

Submit your essay of 250-300 words to me at my email address in MS Word by Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at midnight (this is indeed the real deadline and not an April Fool's joke :-) ). Essays submitted after this deadline will be deleted (I'm sorry, but I have to be strict to keep on top of the work coming in).