Haven't really been a blogger lately, but maybe I should change that. Trying to finish up my last semester and graduate. Teaching is different this semester with twice as many students as last. Trying to keep my lesson plans decent and useful for students. I'm trying to work more materials that my students are interested in, but I have doubts that one text will keep them interested. Not sure what I should do. I would like to act as more of a guide for them, but they are so not accustomed to that, and they don't take charge of their own learning for the most part. I continue talking with one of my students from last semester, and I think she is the most like a "success story" that I have had along that lines. She is at least using Anki a significant amount of time to manage her vocabulary review, and she is taking a regular university class--public speaking.
I'm working on a research proposal for SRS (Spaced Repetition System) like Anki to empower students through training to take charge of what they want to remember. I'm still refining my research question and working out details with dependent/independent variables. I might not be able to do as large of a scope as I want, but this proposal will be a good exercise for me to think carefully about what is going on during vocabulary acquisition.
My studies of Chinese have been a bit lazy for the last 7-8 months. I've listened to a lot, haven't been studying characters much, but I got in the mood last night and review a few. I still want to get up to 2000-2500 before I make it to Taiwan. I've been chatting with a lot of random people on Skype in Chinese, and I do pretty well with a dictionary enough that I can hold most conversations without miscommunications. Some of the people have been really helpful and explain grammar mistakes in Chinese. Sometimes I just don't have the right mentality for saying certain things. For example, I was trying to say "I dance while I teach English" and for some reason I said "正在教时候，我跳舞" when I should have said "我邊教英文 邊跳舞". Kind of a silly comment, but I think I can adjust and I will pay more attention while I am listening.
Anyway, that's all for now. I have updated my blog!
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