W1: Introduction

Hi there,
Welcome to 431R Academic Reading course blog. This is a place where you can explore and acquire vocabulary knowledge by yourself with the help of the enormous resources online. Everyone should create a vocabulary blog by tonight and post your blog link on our course blog, so that other students can add you to their friend lists. The purpose of allowing your peers to visit your blog is to help you and your peers refine the definitions of words through blog discussions in order to learn the word meanings better. To give you a better idea of how to write the blog, go to http://smallbusinessmanagement2011.blogspot.com/ 


Today's assignment:
1. Create your own vocab blog and post the blog link on the course blog.
2. Add this course blog and other students to your friend list. 
3. Practice writing W1 blog.


W1 blog
We are going to learn three words this week: ensure, overlapping, and survey. When writing the word meaning, remember to put the phonetic transcription and part of speech.A tip of writing the definitions is to summarize the definitions found online in your own words.


Ensure

1.      What does “ensure” in the text mean?

2.      Write one synonym of “ensure”.

3.      Make a sentence of “ensure”.

4.      The meaning of “ensure” sometimes is similar to “insure”. However, “insure” has another meaning which “ensure” does not have. What is the different meaning?

Overlapping
1. What does the "overlap" in the text mean?
2. Write one synonym and antonym of "overlap". (Make a sentence of each word, if need be.)
3. Make a sentence of overlapping (or "overlap").


Survey
1. What does "survey" in the text mean?
2. What does "survey" in the following sentences mean:
The survey is about the best restaurants in Honolulu. 
John surveyed the attitudes of the college students toward the library service. 


For your references:
1. Cambridge dictionary online:
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
2. Thesaurus.com
http://thesaurus.com/


If you find out any other good websites for learning words or searching for the word meanings and want to share, please email me. If the websites are considered to be appropriate to the students' levels, I will post the link on our course blog. 


Peer response
After you finish writing your vocab blog, go to  two other students' vocab blogs to comment on the following aspects:
1. Do the definitions given by the students fit into the context in which the words occur?
2. Are the definitions or sentences made by the students clear for you?
3. Do they provide any synonyms and/or antonyms that help me understand the meaning of the word? 
4.How about the grammar?
5. Is there any thing you want to mention?


If you find the information provided by your classmates is useful to you, add the useful information to your blog. Respond to those who leave comments on your blog. In other words, each student should have at least four entries in the activity of leaving comments and responding comments. Entries less than four times will affect your final grade.


Good luck & see you tomorrow :)


Kelly