NarratorListen to a lecture about study activities in a university.Now get rea

Narrator
Listen to a lecture about study activities in a university.
Professor
Good morning, today we’ll look at some study activities carried out in universities. As we know, students in colleges or universities are expected to master some academic materials that are fairly difficult to understand. However, some of them find it hard to learn some complex, abstract or unfamiliar subject matter. As a result, a central problem in higher education is how to internalize academic knowledge, which is how to make knowledge your own. There are four key study activities currently used in higher education to encourage students to internalize knowledge. They are the ones we are familiar with: writing essays, going to classes and seminars, having individual tutorials and listening to lectures. Now let’s look at the features of them one by one.
    First, essay writing, the central focus of university work, especially in humanities, for example in Literature, History or Politics, is on students’ producing regular essays or papers which summarize and express their personal understanding of the topic. Then what is good about essay writing? Firstly, writing essays forces you to select what you find interesting in books and journals and to express your understanding in a coherent manner. Individual written work also provides teachers with the best available guide to how you are progressing in the subject, and allows them to give advice on how to develop your strengths or counteract your weaknesses. Lastly, of course, individual written work is still the basis of almost all assessment in higher education. Written assignment familiarizes you with the form your exams will take.
    The second key activity in colleges and universities is seminars and class discussions. Their role is to help you to internalize academic knowledge by providing such contexts so that you can talk about such difficult problems as the treatment of inflation and the unemployment in economic policy or the use of the metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays. In conversations, you know immediately how effective you are in expressing your point and can modify what you are saying in response to people’s reactions. Then you can hope to manage your written work. Participation in flexible conversations across this range of issues also allows you to practice using the broader knowledge gained from other key activities such as lectures.
    Now let’s take a look at another activity: individual tutorials and discussions between the teacher and one or two students are used in many colleges as a substitute for or to supplement group discussion in classes like those mentioned before. Tutorials can range from a direct explanation by teachers and are subject to flexible conversational sessions which at their best, are very effective in stimulating students’ mastery of a body of knowledge. The one-to-one quality of personal interaction is very important in stimulating acceptance of ideas and producing fruitful interaction. In order to make individual tutorials really work, students should make good preparation beforehand, and during the tutorial, they also should ask questions to keep the ball rolling rather than let the teachers talk in a vacuum.
    The last activity is lectures. As we all know, lectures play a large part of most students’ timetable and occupy considerable proportion of teacher’s efforts. However, the major difficulty with lectures is that they are not interactive like discussions or tutorials. The lecturer normally talks for the whole time with minimal feed-back from questions. The science of making notes and listening to the lecture while concentrating on the argument being developed is often difficult to some students, especially when the argument is very complicated. We have said that lectures are clearly valuable in several specific ways. They can provide a useful overview in every map, as it were, to familiarize you with the mainland features to be encountered during the course. Lectures typically give much more accessible descriptions of theoretical perspectives in their oral presentations than can be found in the academic literature. Lastly, lectures are often very useful in allowing you to see directly how exponents of different views build up their arguments. The cues provided by someone talking in person may seem irrelevant, but these cues are important aids to understanding the subject matter better later.
    So far we’ve discussed four study activities and their respective features and roles in higher education. Of course, study activities are not limited to just these four types. There are other activities that are equally important, such as general reading, project learning, etc. We will cover them during our next lecture.
Now get ready to answer the questions. You may use your notes to help you answer.
12. What is the talk mainly about?
13. What is the main purpose of the professor’s introduction to his lecture?
14. How does the professor define essay writing?
15. According to the professor, what is the function of seminars and class discussion?
16. According to the professor, what does the professor imply about the activity of individual tutorials and discussions?
Listen again to part of the lecture. Then answer the question.
Professor
So far we’ve discussed four study activities and their respective features and roles in higher education. Of course, study activities are not limited to just these four types. They’re other activities that are equally important, such as general reading, project learning, etc. We will cover them during our next lecture.
17. Why does the professor say this?
Professor
Of course, study activities are not limited to just these four types.