ESL Podcast355—Finding a Bargain

To go overboard –to do too much about something, to do something extremely
E.g. If you go to buffet, it’s important not to go overboard.
Outlet mall—it’s where companies sell clothing and other things at cheaper price than the regular store. It’s a place where the clothing wasn’t very popular or perhaps may have small problems.
Bargain—it’s something that cost less than it usually would.
To be discounted—means to be sold at the price lower than usual, or on sale.
Heaven—a place where everything is perfect where one is completely happy.
E.g. I was in spider man heaven meaning I was completely happy in this place.
Reduced prices—same as discounted price. Price lowers than normal.
Knock off the certain amount of the price—lower the price, make the price lower than it was before.
E.g. my mechanic knocked off twenty dollars on my bill to fix my car.
Half price—fifty percent off
Resist—be able to stop yourself from doing something that you want to do.
You went to a buffet and went overboard, now you at home and you have a piece of apple pie in your refrigerator, you have to resist the temptation of eating the apple pie.
Barging basement—the fact that some store used to sell things cheaply, put things on sale in the basement of the store. Means sells things cheaply.
Two for the price of one—there are two for one. You buy one thing and get another free.
Cheap— cost little money or less than usual.
Breather—a break, a pause of an activity.

ESL provides us various conversations taking in different places, and squeezes them into mp3 for learners who can utilize it portably. For the beginners who just started learning English, ESL podcast offers a very well-organized and friendly environment, because the track of speed and the vocabularies are just fit to them. However, for these advanced English learners, the speed would be a little way too slow and the contents are too easy as well. Admittedly, ESL podcast do give some apparent advantages, compared with some English learning magazines, such as cost free and quickly updated. Personally, I would think ESL podcast is a poor version of “Let’s talk in English”, so if you are the fan of Let’s talk in English, ESL podcast offer you another choice to save your pocket.

2009 International Conference on ALLT

It is the big task ever for English department to hold on an important and huge conference in such limited of time. And luckily, after 3 exhausted days, especially for the students who is one month shy from graduation, we finally get over with it successfully.
The preparation before the conference was heavy and bothersome; however, I got a special experience by playing my role---a caterer. As a caterer, we have to make sure the guests are fully satisfied with the foods and drinks served in these days. The timing is essential; we divided it into three parts, the breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea time, to make everyone pleased and full, which provided me more time to sneak into the conference.
There are several different applied linguistics related topic conferences held in three days, but only few of them are related to computer learning. I sneaked into the one called Corpus and Linguistics and Its Application, presented by Jason S. Chang, Hao-Jan Chen and Zhao-Ming Gao. It focuses on the introduction of linguistic corpora and how to use them efficiently while doing research. However, due to the time limitation, I can only sneak in for 15 minutes and have to go out to serve people. It was really sad that I sign to cater crew, which made me unable to participate the conference.