亲爱的BEC班的同学们:
我是怀着无比激动的心情写下这封信的! 今天下午是我们的最后一次课, 上完后, 当我们走出课室时, 我突然感到一失落. 一种强烈的不舍占据了我的心, 因为我有点害怕, 这门课结束以后, 我们不知道什么时候才可以再共聚一堂!
你们一直说感谢我的课, 感谢我对你们的付出, 感谢这门课让你们学到很多东西. 其实每一次听到你们说感谢, 我的心都不免一阵发虚, 因为作为老师的我, 其实并没有为你们做太多的东西. 与其说我是一个传授知识给你们的人, 不如说我是一个督促你们学习的人. 每当想起过去两个月你们所过的生活, 我都忍不住在内心里默默地对你们说: “对不起, 辛苦了!” 毫无疑问, 我是一个非常 “严酷” 的老师, 因为我不仅布置了大量的作业给你们, 而且对你们的作业要求非常的高, 一旦无法达到标准, 就要受到 “恐怖” 的惩罚—罚钱. 虽然说所罚的钱最后是用在我们的聚餐上, 可是所罚的数额之高也让你们感到一定的恐惧. 于是, 你们每一次上课都 “如临大敌”, 生怕作业或者听写出问题而被罚; 课后, 你们在学习和工作之余, 都要拼命挤时间来记那庞大的词汇和做那无休止的作业. 我已经不记得你们有多少次是在深夜作业截止时间的前一刻甚至前一分钟才把作业发到我的邮箱的. 还有很多同学经常为了赶作业赶到深夜一两点. 另外, 也有不少同学花了为了写一个案例分析或者写一篇期刊评论而连续一周苦读苦思…… 这一切我都知道. 有时我也觉得自己把你们逼得太厉害了而感到有点于心不忍, 想放松对你们的要求. 但是很快我就会再次坚定自己曾经的信念: 我不能对你们放松. 我一直觉得, 只要有外在的压力强迫你们去学习, 你们就可以更好地利用你们的时间, 从而发挥出你以前没有开发出来的潜力.
你们也知道, 本来我们的课时就不多, 才维持两个月, 一共才32个课时. 因此, 我们课上学的东西是非常有限的, 关键是你们在课后的努力. 为了让你们在这两个月里学到更多的同学, 我只能不断地强迫你们做大量的阅读和作业来切实地提高你们的英语综合能力. 也就是说, 我其实只是充当一个指引你们方向的监督者. 我知道你们很不容易走到今天! 你们大部分同学都很认真地完成了作业. 你们知道吗? 当我昨晚认真地看了你们最后提交给我的2000词的learning journal时, 我真的又感动又惊讶! 我有点不敢相信那是你们写出来的! 因为这么长的一个作业, 哪怕是要英语专业的人来写都会非常吃力, 但是你们却可以在不到一周的时间里完成, 而且完成得这么出色! 另外, 当你们读完长达几十页的案例并且在课上做presentation时, 我也会非常的感动! 可能我在课上会指出你们很多的不足, 可是在我内心的深处, 我是为你们感到高兴和自豪的, 因为你们在不断地突破自我, 超越自我, 走向更高的境界!
如今, 我们的课结束了. 你们再也不用担心单词没被完或者作业没做完而被罚, 你们也真正解放了! 我在替你们高兴的同时, 也免不了为你们担心, 因为我怕有些同学从此就不会再像以前一样认真地学习了, 英语也会渐渐地荒废! 所以在这里我想真心地提醒你们: 不管以后你们在哪里和从事什么工作, 都不要放弃外语, 因为它将会是你今后人生和事业成功的关键!
今晚和你们聚餐真的很开心! 我们照了许多相, 每一张我都会好好珍藏的! 我会记住你们每一个人的音容笑貌! 其实我们大家都在深圳, 所以要聚会应该还是挺方便的! 我们今晚都说好了, 要每隔一个月就大家出来聚餐一次, 希望大家不要反悔哦! 今晚回来后收到丽婷的信息, 她问我可不可以以后就叫我小琪, 不叫我老师, 她说这样更亲切, 更像是朋友. 我当然乐意你们叫我小琪. 因为我们现在开始不再是师生关系了, 而是好朋友了!
最后, 祝你们身体健康, 万事顺利! 祝考BEC中级的同学考出好绩!
爱你们的老师 Edison
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学生的作业之一:
Learning Journal
------杨丽萍
Introduction
My journal provides details of my learning development as a result of completing the Business English Certification (BEC) course during the last two months. Since my English is so poor, and was given a lot of assignment by the teacher, I had to work very hard to finish all the assignments.
Learning journal is a good tool to evaluate my personal learning development of the course. Therefore, this learning journal will identify the key themes which are most impressive to me. It will also detail my personal improvement and learning methodology changes.
This learning journal comprises five sections. The first section is the introduction. The second section is about the impressive commercial terms and knowledge I’ve learned in the course. The third section mainly concentrates on elaborating on my personal improvement. The fourth section is about the changes of my learning methodology during the course. The last section is the conclusion of this learning journal.
Impressive commercial terms & knowledge
1） The Social Responsibility of Business
Social Responsibility is the obligation a business assumes to maximize its positive impact and minimize its negative impact on society. That was my first time to hear about the term and its definition. Many people in China may not have heard about the term at all. In China, most businesses consider profit as the only important thing. Because charity costs money, they don’t want to spend money on something that can’t create finance value. Even if they do some charity, in their opinion, that is their contribution to society, not their responsibility. However, I think they should see charity another way. Many companies spend high amounts of money on advertising to promote their product. In fact, if they spend the money on charity, they will get good reputation and increase the sales volume of their product. They can make the money back maybe even more than what they spend on charity. Meanwhile, they help those people who are in trouble. That is a win-win. Businesses can often improve their operation and profits in the long run by working to improve the overall society.
In some developed countries like USA or some Europe countries, there are so many businesses and enterprisers like charity. They donate large sum of money to charity like helping poor people on housing. I think Chinese businesses should learn about “social responsibility of business” from foreign companies and enterprisers. Business organizations should serve society rather than society serving business.
2） Consumerism.
Consumerism is what we often hear in our life, especially on March every year. In many countries, consumer legislation encompasses four basic areas: the right to safety, the right to be informed, the right to choose, and the right to beard. According to the food safety in China nowadays, I have to say that the right to safety in consumerism of Chinese people has been infringed totally, so does the right to be informed. Milk powder added melamine, hogwash oil and other food which is noxious can be seen everywhere. The situation is so serious that we don’t know what food we eat is safety. So many business people care about nothing but making money and for money they sale food what they know exactly will kill people. There is so much to do with consumerism in China, particularly in food industry.
3） Never stop moving forward.
That is what I learned from the case study Motorola in China: Failure of Success? Motorola was the first foreign company entered China’s handset market and made a great success in the early age. However, because it stopped improving its products, Motorola lost its market share to Nokia and other competitors. In business world, if you stop moving forward, you are falling back and maybe even finally eliminated from the market.
4) Some basic rules of joint venture operations in China.
a. Don’t use technical legal techniques to assert or gain control in joint venture. Most Chinese business people know little about the laws of joint venture, so don’t play games like buyout with Chinese business people, they won’t buy it. If you do, they will feel being cheated.
b. Do not expect a 51% ownership interest in a joint venture to provide effective control. If you want the effective control of the joint venture, make the ownership at least 70%.
c. Do not proceed with a joint venture formed on a weak or uncertain legal basis. If bad things happen, your partner wants to sue you, you may lose the lawsuit. You hardly have laws to support you.
d. The foreign party must actively supervise or participate in the day-to-day management of the joint venture. You should let the employees know that you are one of the directors of the joint venture. By actively supervising or participating in the day-to-day management, you can know exactly what is going on in the joint venture, what the real operation situation is and won’t be cheated by your partner.
Personal improvement
Reflecting on the BEC course as well as my personal learning, I would like to detail it by shedding light on various benefits this course has brought to me.
1) Increased Knowledge.
After nearly two months of BEC studies, I have gained a tremendous amount of new knowledge that I did not learn before. In the previous part, I have talked about some impressive commercial terms and knowledge I learned from the course. Now I would like to give another example. In my first summary of case study Mengniu, I made a big mistake. In the conclusion I used the phrase “in my opinion” and talked about my own view on this case study. After corrected by the teacher, I know what summary is and how to write a summary of an article.
2) Increased Ability to Analyze and Critique
By the third week of the course, what I had done to the case studies were just reading and writing summaries of them. I didn’t think about analyzing them even for a second. In the class of the third week, Mr. Lai asked us to think about what we should learn from Motorola, and said some of his own opinion. For the first time, I knew that besides writing summaries, we should analyze and critique those case studies. By doing so, not only do I have a deeper understanding of the articles I have read, but also I learn to critique on the viewpoints argued in the articles. I think that’s the right way of learning.
3) Increased Ability to Present
In the BEC course, we are required to give a two-minute speech at the beginning of the class every time and a presentation by each group. I have learned how to present things to others from those practices. A good presentation contents three basic factors: clear structure, profound view and plentiful and strong arguments. You should get them prepare. The behavior of presenters is also very important. Presenters need to be confident, familiar with what they are going to present. I not only practice my spoken English but also improve my presenting skills.
4) Increased Ability to Communicate
During the course, we are separated into several groups. Each group need to do discussions on given topics in the class. After class, we need to discuss our presentation with our teammates. That requires teamwork. By the discussions with my partner, I learn many communication skills. When we come to different opinions on something, we know we need to compromise with each other for finish the tasks.
5) Increased Ability to Coordinate
There are about 11 students taking this course. We come from different background, two of us are still university students, and others are all on jobs. Some students’ English is very good while some students’ isn’t. Our English is in different levels, so is our understanding about commercial knowledge. When doing group discussion, we need to take care of our partners whose English is not so good and help them express themselves more fluently. Actually, I found that those classmates whose English maybe not good, but they know much knowledge about business. For example, I learned the phrase “distribution channel” from my partner. Besides, they study very hard, that is what I should learn from them. Though we know each other in a short time, we get along well.
6) Increased Ability to Manage Time
There was so such homework every week, including a lot of reading of the two textbooks, summaries of long case studies, memorizing tons of new words and expressions and so on. Besides, if you can’t finish the homework, there are punishments, which make us so nervous. Therefore, I must know how to manage my time efficiently to do all the homework and finish it well. I divide a week into four parts:
a. On Monday and Tuesday, I read the case study of that week and write summary of it.
b. On Wednesday and Thursday, I memorize the new words in both textbooks.
c. On Friday and Saturday, I go through the articles in the textbooks.
d. On Sunday, I have a good sleep and go to class.
Learning Mythology changes
When we come to difficulties in our life, we need to get over them, for that sometimes we need to make some changes. I met many difficulties in the course. To solve the problems, I keep looking for better way to do things and make some changes of my learning mythology. There are two examples about my learning mythology changes as follows:
1) Writing Summary
When I wrote the first and the second summary of case studies, I read through the whole case study firstly, and then I started to write the summary of the article. It was really a hard task. When I finished reading the last part of the case study, I had already forgotten the first part of it. It included so many contents that I couldn’t remember all of them. So I had to go over the article again and again when writing the summary. It took me almost two days to finish a summary of a case study. It just wasted my time. In order to save my time, I kept improving the way I wrote summaries of case studies. Finally, I find my way. When reading a case study, I write a short summary after finishing every part. After I finish the whole article, I string all short summaries together and make some improvement, and then a summary is done.
2) New Words Study
I have a bad memory. It was hard for me to memorize new words. I could memorize the English words, but I couldn’t connect them with their Chinese explanations. Dictation means a torture to me. I was the one who often got punished. Luckily, I found a great function of the dictionary on my computer. I can save new words in its word library, classify them by date or level. The best part is that it supplies tests on words. The tests includes multiple-choice and blank-filling, you can choose the type you want. For myself, I choose multiple-choice firstly, that help me memorize the words’ Chinese explanations; and then I do blank-filling to memorize the words’ spelling. The tests help me go over the new words quickly and it makes the process of memorizing new words not so boring any more.
Conclusion
By doing this learning journal, I looked back the past two months in the BEC course. I realize that I have learnt a lot from the course, not just commercial knowledge, but some other things. My English is getting better, though it still not so good. I improve my abilities to analyze, critique, present, communicate and manage time. I change my learning mythology. I find the advantages of my classmates and learn from them. I also discover that I have so many shortcomings to overcome. I will improve myself with English and abilities in the future. |
