Category: edci335

I am writing a post about inquiry-based learning.

This learning method is more targeted. Instructors do not need to teach everything to the learners. Learners read the learning materials and ask questions. The instructors teach them according to their questions and the part of knowledge that they don’t understand. Each learner’s comprehension ability and advantages are different, so the difficult contents each one finds are also different. If it is a direct instruction, some learners may think they are wasting time because they already understand what they are teaching. Other learners may think that the explanation is not detailed enough. This results in a waste of instructors’ resources and learners’ time.

Nonetheless, inquiry-based learning is only suitable for small classes. Imagine a class with hundreds of people, there is no way for the instructors to teach all students based on their questions. There is too much work load and is less efficient than direct instruction.

Overall, I think inquiry-based learning is more effective in small-class instruction but not suitable for big classes.

In order to study in Canada, I guess every foreign student needs to learn English and pass the English proficiency test, at least before I go abroad. For me who lived in China for more than ten years, the process of learning English was very difficult. There were many challenges I met at that time. Here I choose one that impressed me the most.

Memorizing English words is the basis of learning English. Words to English are like gasoline to an airplane. An airplane can’t fly without gasoline. In the process of memorizing words, I have encountered great difficulties, and if this difficulty is not overcome, I can’t continue to learn English. The difficulty of memorizing words is that there are too many words. They often stare at one word for a few minutes, look at other words, and then forget when they come back. Although I didn’t write down many words, I still read most of the word books. After reading thousands of words, I found that many words have similarities. For example, many words begin with “in”, which means negative. Many other words begin with “im”, which means inward, and “ex”, which means outward. At that time, I wondered if the efficiency would be much faster if similar words were sorted together and memorized. If I recite words in alphabetical order as I did before, I can only recite them one by one, which will be much less efficient. Therefore, I tried the new method that I came up. Through the new method, I only need to memorize a “port” to memorize the meaning of “import” and “export”.

This method really makes me memorize words much more efficiently, and adds more fun to my learning of English. I overcame the difficulties in my study in this way. I think this method can be summarized as flexibly changing learning methods to achieve better learning results. This way can not only solve my learning difficulties at that time, but also expand to more learning fields.