Saturday, August 14, 2010

A few things that I have learned in Language Arts

This year, I have learnt a lot of things in Language Arts lessons by Mr Lundberg. In this blog post, I am going to share a few things that I have learnt.

Currently, we are learning how to understand and appreciate poems. Previously in Primary School, we were not taught about poems and this is a completely new topic for most of us. Unravelling the meanings of the poems is interesting and sometimes difficult. To find out the meanings of the poems, we have to understand the whole poem before looking into each line carefully. Most of the time, we have to link the lines together to check if our understanding is correct. We have to read in between the lines as information is not directly given in a poem. We have to work things out for ourselves from the clues given in the text such as its figurative language. There may also be puns in the poem. A pun is a " play on word " in which a writer either uses a word which has two( or more ) often contradictory meanings, or uses two differently spelt words which sound the same. There are also rhythms, which are controlled by the use of punctuation, rhyme, repetition and different line lengths.

Another valuable thing I have learnt is summary writing. Summary writing is important as it does not beat around the bush and just goes straight to the point. Although the summarised part may not be too informative, it is shorter than the passage and easier to digest. Summarising a passage is quite simple. The main thing is to highlight and take note of the important points in a passage. There is a limit to the number of words you can write in a summary. Write down all your points and count them to see if they exceed the limit. After that, you can start writing the summary. You should not miss out any main points in the passage as this is a summary and is supposed to contain all the important information in the passage.

Last but not least, I believe that my grammar and vocabulary have also improved. These are some of the things that are valuable to me that I have learnt in Language Arts lesson this year.

1 comment:

  1. Indeed we have learned alot of new stuffs in secondary school. Poetry is really something new. It is really hard and boring as we need to go through alot of steps in order to find out the meaning of the whole poem, like you said, read in between the lines. Summary writing was really hard for me at the start, but I realise if you follow the steps it can become really simple.

    ReplyDelete