LEARNING CENTER
Mission: Our mission is to assist our students to develop into autonomous learners who are willing to take more responsibility for their own learning by providing them various supplementary resources.
Vision: The Learning Center will be a unique tool in developing students’ language skills as well as their personal, intellectual and social growth both through its vibrant and stimulating environment and consultancy aspect with the purpose of guiding them to have sustained interest in learning and become individual learners with critical thinking skills.
LEARNING CENTER EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
At Bahcesehir University Preparatory School we believe that our students during their one year education become equipped with language skills and learning strategies to further their interdisciplinary academic studies as well as the social, cultural and intellectual facets to develop their learning awareness and critical thinking skills. We strive to reach this target by empowering our students with a dynamic learning environment including study groups, one to one tutorials, debate groups and audio-visual group sessions. We appreciate that every student is an individual and has unique and different learning style and we endeavor to raise students’ awareness of their own learning.
1. SELF- ACCESS CENTER (SAC)
The aim of The Self Access Center is to endow the students with various reading, writing, grammar, audio-visual and computer-based interactive resources for each level to be able to lead them in taking responsibility for their own learning. Subsequent to identifying their language weaknesses students are encouraged to find the materials that are suitable for them and do self-study to overcome their weaknesses outside the classroom hours. To develop their learning awareness we give our students an opportunity to evaluate their own work with a model answer or a key to identify the challenging areas and to take a further action such as getting an appointment from one of the Learning Center instructors to have a one to one study session or participate in the tutorials on a regular basis. With the teachers’ assistance students are able to cope with their weaknesses in a more efficient way as they grasp different learning strategies for different language skills.
Independent learning
- Assist the student set manageable and attainable goals.
- Guide the student set an objective before doing each activity.
- Provide choices for the student to design their learning plan and strategies.
- Offer the student a choice of when and where to study & involve them in learner training by introducing strategies.
- Have the students survey the materials in the suggested resources.
- Train the students how to write their reflection.
- Facilitate the students to develop language awareness.
- Have the students reflect on their process of learning by discussing activities, problems & solutions.
- Encourage the students to be reflective through self-assessment and work more on their language weaknesses.
- Link what the student is doing with language acquisition
2. WRITING CENTER
The mission of the Writing Center is to provide assistance and support on writing techniques within the framework of a Task Based Learning System. The Writing Center fulfills its mission by providing the students content area one to one tutoring. The Center aims to create a real purpose for language use and provide a natural context for language study.
Writing Center operates via students’ application either with their own initiatives or with the guidance of their instructors’. After students spot their areas of weaknesses with the help of their instructors, they have one to one feedback sessions on their assigned tasks in The Writing Center which helps them immensely to enhance their writing skills and work on problematic areas. The Center offers students a rich but comprehensible exposure to language in use, through writing.
Goals and Objectives
- To provide support for the process of skills development in writing;
- To use and encourage a task-based approach to writing;
- To provide learners with the motivation to improve and build on whatever language they already have.
- To help students become better independent writers who possess crucial TBL writing sub-skills, such as meaningful brainstorming, finding more creative ways to express himself, reporting and evaluating his findings while prioritizing his message, etc
- To support the idea that learning needs to be an ongoing process, a self-motivated process and a process that stems from independent learning;
- To encourage lifelong learning by helping students to develop efficient and effective approaches to learning.
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