english course log

Poster Session

This Friday evening was the occasion to organize a poster session. Three groups presented and explained their work. It combines text and graphics to make a visually pleasant presentation.

Then, as viewers walk by, our poster should quickly and efficiently communicate our subject. A Poster Session allows viewers to study and restudy your information and discuss it with you one on one.

Preparing a well-organized, visually-pleasant poster requires to plan well in advance. First, we must consider the audience and what type of poster we will create. Next, we have to gather our supplies and decide what information to include. From this point, we can start to work on the text and graphics.

By surfing on Internet, I discovered this website which gives some information about How to Present a Poster Session: http://educ.queensu.ca/~ar/poster.htm

I think there is some good advice about the global presentation.

From my point of view, it is important to be prepared for questions that people viewing our poster will ask us. We can’t put all information about our subject on the restrictive size poster so our response to questions demonstrates our knowledge of subject.

Cecile and I worked on the Lotus effect, but I will not describe our poster in this summary. According to me, it’s more interesting and constructive for all of us, to give comments and details about posters we discovered during the poster session.

Assma and Oliver presented us the paper making. Their poster had a good overall appearance. It was very pleasant to look at. A first glance gave us immediately a quick and efficient sum up about principal events of “ paper history ”. A second part described the main step of paper fabrication.

This presentation was clear. Maybe there was not enough text to explain graphics, but it was easy to read and well organized.

About the paper history:

In 3000 BC, the first paper appears: it’s the papyrus. With Ts’ai Lun, in 105 AC, it’s the birth of paper in the actual form, which we know today. We had to wait for the 15th century and the use of milds to produce paper more rapidly. In the 19^th century, there was a mechanization of handwork and industries used chemicals process instead of textile waste to create paper.

During the 20^th century, we assisted to an industrialization of fabrication.

The question raised by this subject is about the end of paper. We can ask ourselves if, with the development of the internet and informatics, paper is still useful.

From my point of view, it’s easier to read information on a book than on a screen. Besides, it’s more reliable to keep information writing. Even if there is a lot of a method to save files, I think informatics is less efficient to keep important information.

About the paper fabrication, I will quickly detail the main steps. Trees provide primary material. The forest is needed for its wood. We use cellulose in the paper industry. Fibers are bounding together by lignin. Then paper fibers are sent to sawmills, and after all this process, digester separate fibers in individual ones. Unblashed paper is washed and then the paper pulp is dried and pressed into cylinders. Eventually, paper machine manufacture sheets.

The second subject was landfill. This poster was less attractive even if the presentation was interesting. There was more white space and text size was too small to view comfortably. I think there was a lack of balance text/graphic.

Each year, in France, every person produces 925 pounds of trash. With this poster, we discovered different possibilities to treat waste. For example, we can use landfill, incinerator or landfill gas.

For all of these techniques, we must weigh up the pros and the cons of their use.

Incinerator has got some advantages; we can reach 90 % of compression waste, and there is a well mastery of energy recovery. But in the other hand, incinerator creates heavy gas emission and 10 % of wastes are not treated.

I think, the worst way to treat waste is landfill open dumps. They produce air pollution, bad smell. Moreover, they spoiled landscape.

To avoid these disadvantages, maybe we can use modern landfill, for which compression waste ranging is from 50 to 60 %.

This subject was attractive but maybe environmental issues are too important and general to be well treated in this poster session.

I appreciated this work in pairs. We haven’t comment a lot of posters but I think, everybody had time to explain his work and tended to present main points of his subject in an attractive and clearly way.

Master 1 Physics

year : 2008

Teacher : Miss ANNE

For Master 1 students, the English course is one way to learn to be competent in giving a clear talk about an unknown or known subject with the aid of a visual support. Moreover, the student must be able to answer factual questions about his presentation.

English course offers the possibility to use vocabulary and to describe techniques learnt in Minimum Competence in Scientific English (L3)

Besides, the student has to take notes and must know how to summarize the contents of a lecture. This text can be a general English article or a scientific one. Plus, the pupil must be capable of understanding the main elements, but also picking up important details. His skimming and scanning abilities will be tested. It’s always useful for a student to be able to consult a one language dictionnary.

Not only the student must be able to read with ease with a particular attention on stress, but he also has to be able to discuss with a particular people about his work (for example during poster section). His listening skills will be also improved thanks to English course. The student learns to understand a dialogue, or to notice the main points or to memorize names and numbers given in English.

Eventually, pupil must be able to understand a research article about their speciality. Key words, knowledge about the subject or scientist vocabulary are tools (sur lesquels) student must focus.

Follow up

20.01

This English lesson helped to improve listening skills. It’s well worth mentioning the fact that knowledge of the subject, the vocabulary and the culture is very important to understand a dialogue. Nevertheless, we learn some technics to prepare listening exam. We must read questions carefully or try to predict questions. Then we can focus on the main subject and gather ours knowledge about it. We can’t understand everything, so we must listen for main points, key words. Sound quality is also very important. Eventually, we can sum up informations, ans fill key words or numbers in a form.

Moreover, we reviewed signposts like although, yet or despite.

27.01

This English course gave us the occasion to organise a survey. In pairs, we chose a topic, wrote five questions about it and began to question other people in a group. We gathered results and gave a little talk about them. Our presentation was in graph form. We used pie charts and bar charts. In this way, results are clearely exposed and this is easier for students to describe them. This work allowed ud to use specific vocabulary about proportion : just less than a quarter, average …

Moreover, this session was a first contact between everybody in the group. This survey was one way to get to know better the other students.

This English session was particularly rich. Even if the teacher wasn’t here, we could train ourselves to pass the writing exam. In fact, we worked on a former test. It was the occasion for us to pace ourselves. We learnt to manage with time and techniques. It gave us a general survey of the exam.

Besides, we improved our reading comprehension by studying three texts which dealt with: right and left-handedness, beekeeper movements and eventually tourism. It trained us to focus on main ideas in an article, and also to find important details.

Moreover, we tackled reading techniques. A student must make his reading more efficient by defining his purpose for reading. He can also summarize the information after finding it quickly by scanning.

To study efficiently, we should always be aware of our purpose and be ready to adapt our approach to the text.

During this English lesson, we focused on a subject which is still relevant: environment issue, and more especially the light pollution.

First of all, we organized a little chat about general statements dealing with accidents, damages causing by bright lights, bad lighting in big cities and the impact of street lighting on criminality.

In one hand, it was useful because we learnt vocabulary but in other hand, we didn’t exchange very deeply on this subject because of this lack of Lexis.

This English course has given us the occasion to work on a technique point for the exam. Before reading carefully an article or a text extract, student must copy headings, titles or questions on his paper in order to keep in mind, mean ideas which appear on it.

The efficiency of the reading is improved by this preview work.

Eventually, we watched a video about a “light saving team”: les pécheurs d’électricité . This group invented the “canne à Watt”, a tool designed to switch off shop lights from outside and by this way avoid the wastes of energy.

This English session enables us to improve our reading comprehension. In fact, we tried to understand and to sum up an article taken from Chemistry World. This exercice also helps to improve our skill to manage with scientist vocabulary. The aim was to pick up the main ideas from the text and to be able to explain the article content to an other student without any notes.
With this way to present a subject, we discovered the interest of “ visual language ”. We could use graphics to support our speech. We learnt how communication is simplified by using charts and clear draws.
Eventually, we listened to another group presentation and wrote a little paragraph about what we had understood. This last listening exercise is from my point of view, the most difficult but also the most useful. It trains us to listen carefully and to take notes very quickly.

This article is taken from Chemistry World. It deals with a fungus from the Patagonian forest. It describes a biological process that can be an alternative to crude oils.

In fact, mushrooms have the faculty to attack cellulose cells. A most fungus must use a lot of chemical steps to do it, so it’s not an efficient technique. But one of them attacks cellulose in a straightforward process.

It can provide fuel and diesel, a biodiesel (myco) so it’s an amazing progress for environment and earth energy.

Researchers are leading scientific investigations to isolate the fungus genes. If they suceed in putting these genes in bacterium, this process may be done an industrial scale on and could be a real alternative to crude oils.

from my point of view, it’s really difficult to retranscribe stress on syllable. That is why, I suggest this link to you : http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html

You can, on this website, listen to pronunciation.

And for more fun, meet the easter bunny : http://www.acapela.tv/EasterBunny.html

This English course previewed internet possibilities for us. In a first time, we logged on edublog site. We created our personal account, and a new virtual world opened. We chose our blog title, design. Moreover, we learnt to use tags, and comments for our own blog. From my point of view, it was the most interesting. In fact, i didn’t know this communication system and i appreciated to discover it. According to me, it’s an efficient and fast way to send information and exchange with somebody. We looked for tutorial videos to learn to manage with all blog possibilities. Unfortunately, connection issues slowed down our progression.

Besides, social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website.