Assignment 2 : Individual Online Listening and Writing

The English language is permanently evolving and developing. New words and expressions are coined and existing words change their meaning. BBC Learning English website really can help me to keep my English up to date I can do some extra work by this way.

The aims of the audio script are to improve the listening skills and knowledge of English language. Professor David Crystal is a famous expert on language. He gives a few short talks on the origins and usage of new and evolved words and phrases that have recently made it into the language, but not even found in dictionaries.

The language work in this talk focuses on the acronym from phases.

The new word which is found in the talk is WYSIWYG. It is an acronym meaning 'what you see is what you get'. It means that what you see on the screen is what you get in the output. This type of acronym, when a phase becomes a collection of initials is common in internet chat and mobile phone text conversations.

After listened to the talk, I am just knowing that who is Britney Spears and she had a song which included it - 'because I can promise U baby what you see is what U get' - the word 'you' was spelt with just a capital letter 'U'. I have never known this before. I also think it got its accolade, this phrase, as what was told by Professor David Crystal.

In my opinion, it is difficult to detect a word with the basic knowledge of English languages since the sounds of word can be difference for other country. Therefore, I may know how to pronounce some words correctly after reading the transcript according to the audio script repeatedly. Then, I learn the grammar part and a lot of new words with their explanations.

There are a lot of vocabularies I learnt from the talk, some of them are:
(a) Acronym - a word made from the first letters of a group of words.
(b) A cross-dressing character - a female actor who wears a male clothes on stage, or the
other way around.
(c) Circumstances - situation or contexts.
(d) An accolade - praise for or recognition of great achievement.

I feel very enjoyable with this learning section of online listening. I am quite curious about this talk because I just know that the existence of the acronym and some acronyms are interesting, for example, ASAP that stands for ‘as soon as possible’, but it means smoke in Malay language. This morning, I just found that it is used in an advertisement at bus stop in front of the faculty. Besides, I learnt that ATM is not only used as a short form of automatic teller machine, but it is also stands for ‘at the moment’,.

On the other hand, I would like to thank Madam Sitha who has taught us so much that were involving the funny activities during this short semester. She asked us to find the meaning and example of the idioms that used parts of the human body. In addition, we learnt about acrostic poem. I found that it is quite interesting when we are asked to write acrostic poems for each word in our names which will describe the attitudes of us. Then, Madam Sitha taught us about affixes which are divided into two parts, prefix and suffix. Besides, I also knew some misuse words, for examples, eligible and illegible.

Therefore, I think I have learnt more about English and like it so much.

Reference: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/.../1130_uptodate2/

From: TAY SEK FONG A106738