Resourses
How do I develop discipline-specific English through various means and how do these resources enhance my learning of discipline-specific English?
TED Talk is one of the favourite ways to cultivate my discipline-specific English because there are numerous videos talked by specialists from multifarious fields such as science, technology and business. Being able to watch the multitudinous videos from a different range of disciplines aside, I can also learn an exclusive amount of vocabulary and terminologies to develop my exposure of discipline-specific English. Since the majority of videos are for the public, the speakers ordinarily elaborate on those particular jargons in a straightforward manner. Furthermore, since all of those videos can be manifested with multilingual subtitles, it is easier for me to understand the content of different speakers. When I read some complicated vocabulary and terminologies, I will firstly guess the meaning of it, and after that, I will look them up from the Cambridge Dictionary and mark them down in the glossary of discipline-specific terminologies. By imitating the presentation of the speakers, this can hugely improve my speaking skills in English, such as applying stress, rhythm, cadence and intonation in my speech. More importantly, it can also help reinforce my memory and learning of discipline-specific English.
The talk held by Elon musk would be an appropriate example to illustrate how I have learned from Ted talk. First of all, Elon musk is a very famous entrepreneur, investor and business tycoon, and he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs that I admire. He shared a lot about his philosophy behind Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity which are all innovative corporations established by him. On the one hand, I can understand the concepts behind these advanced companies and advantages brought to humanity. For instance, in order to reduce the air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, Elon Musk believes that electric vehicles (EV) has less carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than gasoline vehicles (GV), so people can reduce the size of their own carbon footprint through replacing GV by EV, namely Tesla, to lead humanity a cleaner environment. On the other hand, I can also learn plenty of discipline-specific vocabulary from the environmental, technological, and even financial domains, for example, I have learned some energy terminologies which are related to environment and automotive car industry like ‘‘CO2 (carbon dioxide)’’, ‘‘natural gas’’, ‘‘fossil fuel’’ and ‘‘navigation on autopilot’’, ‘‘roadster’’ or ‘‘steam turbine’’ being used to produce electricity respectively.