Saturday, September 23, 2006

My students working hard in the computer lab



My students are asking their classmates some questions so that they can write a short paragraph introducing their classmates. They are asked to write the introduction of their classmates on bolg. They will learn how to use blog soon.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Rank one at Google search engine in Taiwan



My website (keyword: Michael Wu) is ranked the first one at Google search engine in Taiwan among the 27,600,000 results. However, when you key in my Chinese name 吳文舜, my website has not been ranked the first one as it was before. :-(

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Travel Grant from National Science Council

I received a letter from National Science Council (NSC) on May 10. It said that they would reimburse my traveling and accommodation expenses up to NT$50,000 on my trip to Brisbane, Australia from July 4 to July 6, 2006. I am going to present my paper titled "Mental images and contextual clues: A comprehension study of animal idiomatic expressions in an EFL environment" in PacSLRF 2006 held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. It's the first time I get travel grant from NSC in Taiwan, which is an encouragement to me. I will try my best to present my paper and hope that I can also get some feedback from the audience.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

English writing teachers

I took three English writing-related courses at Tamkang university this semester. One of my classmates said that I am a WWW (three writing classes) student this semester. Once I took three writing classes, I found writing is the most difficult skills among the four language skills. Of course, you have more time to construct your ideas, edit your drafts, and make multiple revisions; however, the most challenging part of writing to me is that you should be careful about what you write, for it is black and white (or 0 and 1 in this digital age). Therefore, people can retrieve it and any obvious errors will be easily spotted. Speaking, on the other hand, has different challenges. In most situations, we do not have time to organize our ideas or rehearse it before we speak out. Nevertheless, you can "deny" your errors unless someone talk to you records your conversation.
The other day, one of my classmates asked a question in one of my writing classes. I think it is a pretty good one. She asked whether we English teachers should become good English writers before we can teach English writing. That is to say, can we teach English writing if we can't write English properly? Think about this question if you are an English teacher. I will talk about this issue in my later postings.
I will try my best to write something and post it on this blog, probably a couple of postings every week. Let's see how it works.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

BubbleShare

I just found a wonderful site called "BubbleShare". It is still in its beta version. I created a photo album for my daughter Yvonne. I upload photos, record captions, and put URL links to my blog. Here it is.