Sunday, January 11, 2009


Where is this little baby looking to? What is looking for? Only a little happiness and confidence or does she only want to survive? 27th December 2008 Saturday. Israel started to attack to Gaze with the excuse of Hamas’ rockets. Thousands of Palestinians were killed by tanks, war planes, battleships, helicopters…. Israel has the power so it does whatever it wants in the Middle East. They always kill innocent civil public. It may be the law of the life but in the same conditions. Palestinians have nothing to stand out against Israel and its ally U.S.A. They have only stones, slings and the most important hearts which live only for independent Palestine. It may be impossible for them to beat Israel but they do not stop, do not throw in the towel. They fight with whatever they find but the most annoying thing is that they are alone. We may blame or shame Israel but we do not do anything to help these innocent people. They see us as an ally but we cannot help on these conditions. They are alone and they know that, however, they do not despair. We can arrange protests, we can shout at Israel but it is useless for dying Palestinians. This shameful action must be stopped. A nation is dying in front of the world. For what? Only for a holly empire?

In the first derby match of the 2009, Galatasaray Man Basketball team defeated the FBÜlker with 78-62 and preserved the second rank in the Beko Basketball League. The match naturally started with a high and tense atmosphere. Galatasaray was on the pitch with Cüneyt, Hüseyin Graves, Zizic and Groviç. FBÜlker, Green, Ömer, Preldzic, Mirsad and Vidmar. The beginning of the match was unproductive for both teams in terms of crores but then the host side, Galatasaray, started to score easily with the help of its fans supporting their team on the tribune in the first period of the match. However, in the second and third periods FBÜlker provided a balance with the scores of Smith and Preldzic but it was not enough to catch up with Galatasaray. In the end Galatasaray fans celebrated their team’s victory. Before the match high security precautions were taken.After the match Galatasary fans celebrated their victory in the hall and on the streets. This match was important because it was the first derby match of the new year and it was written to history.

Nicenet: This site provides a limitless location for guides, teachers and lecturer to publish, create and share links, online debate activities, discussions, and other things about course theme with students. We can learn the suitable and useful sites for our educational progress. We use this site to create a more affective teaching and learning. Our teachers put the information, subjects, comments about the course and our homework. We can look our feedback and past works and lessons’ content. In our technology era, such kind of site is very useful to provide affective teaching and learning. When I will become a teacher, I will definitely use such kind of sites.

PB Wiki: This site is one of the most effective one created specially for group working. Every one of the group members can add something to the site and in the end a united work appear. We can reorganize our texts and our friends’ writings and essays. We can comment on other group members’ texts and adjust them. Besides we add everything to this site such as videos, photos, documents, links and other tens of useful tools for our education.


Blogger: Blogger is a web page which serves as a freely easily reached personal journal for a specific person. As a rule this site is updated daily, blogs often serve as a digital paper or book for the author. Instead of writing on a paper, using this page is more comfortable for the writer and thanks to that other people can easily reach the data on the blogs whenever they want. We can add photos, links, texts and videos. These make the subject more understandable and the page more interesting. We can do our homework by using this page. We do not need to stay in the class for long hours and write on the paper over and over. We cannot put aside our sheets, works and essays for a long time but by using this page we can save them forever and look them whenever we want. We can read our friends’ text without standing up our chair. On the other hand we have some problems about this site. One of them is that we sometimes have difficulties in connecting to internet. In our dormitory we have a wireless connection and it sometimes does not connect and we cannot write our texts, essays, etc.

Friday, January 9, 2009


We have listening and pronunciation course in this term. It is a very useful for our educational development especially in speaking and understanding of the speech. In order to achieve these skills we have a lot of listening and speaking activities, however, they are not effective for our progress. Specially, Praat, a kind of program by which you can record and edit voice of sentences or words, is a nightmare for us. I hate this program and do not want to record anything but it is a compulsory activity for our course and we have to do it each week. It is very difficult because we do not have suitable physical environment for recording. In our dormitories, we have a clamor every time. Our computers and microphones are not suitable for this high specialized activity. For some of us, who has not a notebook, it becomes more and more annoying. On the other hand, the words that we must record are from different accents from different English speaking regions. One of them can be from Canada and another from Australia. This difference makes the work vary hard for us. We do not know even one accent but this activity enforce us to repeat the pronunciation of the words and sentences. We do not learn anything.

Saturday, December 27, 2008


Who is a good English teacher? There are many ways to define good English teacher. Most people would agree that good English teachers are caring, supportive, concerned about the welfare of students, knowledgeable about subject matter and capable of speaking fluently, excited about the work that they do. English teachers must have different properties from other teachers. They do not only teach a subject. They teach a language, a culture and a new glance to the world. Besides characteristics and other common qualifications, a good English teacher should have a great deal of general culture, (s)he should know what is happing in the world and especially countries where English is spoken as a native language. Teaching a language is difficult and may be impossible if your students do not like it and want to learn. This is your duty. They first like you and your job and then English. I have a lot of English teachers in my educational life but none of them is the teacher I dreaming. One of them has good characteristics but do not know anything about English and general culture. One has a good memory, general culture and knows much about English and their culture but does not have good characteristics to be an affective and a good teacher. The good teacher I think have all of this characteristics and qualities, (s)he should like teaching and their students.

Friday, December 26, 2008


People cannot live alone, they must have a family, friends and live in a society. Wemeet thousands of people in our daily life but we can like a few of them. The relation between us and them starts when we find some mutual similarities in our lives. However, it is only a little of the process. We search for some characteristics which are important for us. They can be dependability, decency, sympathy, helpfulness and craziness. I think dependability is the most important character in a friend relationship. If you rely on you friend and your friend also trust you, other problems can be solved anyway but you do not rely on your friend, even when you are undecided about your friend’s reliance, you can loss everything. Another important characteristic is decency. We have a lot of obstacle in our relationship with friends. We can overcome them with these two important characteristics, dependability and decency. Other characteristics are sympathy, geniality, helpfulness and a little craziness.

I think the national elections of the U.S.A. determined the man of the year. It is surely Hussein Barrack Obama. He is the first black man to be opted for as a president of the U.S.A. He realized the dream of the Martin Luther and millions of black people living in U.S.A. It is a new chance for us to provide an equal and good world. He has a lot of promises about the politics of the U.S.A. The most important of them is his saying that U.S.A. will draw back the soldiers from Iraq as soon as possible. I think it is also important for us. If U.S.A. does not have soldiers and Iraq has its own army, we will have suitable conditions while crusading against the terrorists. U.S.A. has directs the world since the World War II but people all around the world are against the politics of current U.S.A. government. Maybe Obama understands why he was selected and supported by other countries and puts in order the world.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008


Phonetics is a branch of linguistics which is interested in the study of the physical speech sounds used in speech. It does not focus on the meanings of words. Because of poor English pronunciation, phonetic alphabet is used. It has letters which are counterparts of the sounds in English. English words are not read as they are written so phonetic alphabet is important to articulate and spell the words properly. All around the world the letters of this alphabet are vocalized same so people can understand the pronunciations of the words. In fact it is easy for Turkish people to be accustomed to this special alphabet. Because the letters of it and the pronunciation of the letters are generally same with our national alphabet for example we pronounce ‘keep’ as /kı:p/ . We use ‘e’ sound in Turkish as ‘İ’ as the same as phonetic alphabet. We can use this opportunity only when we know the correct pronunciation of the words.

Saturday, November 29, 2008


Facebook is a social useful site to meet friends and continue to have a relationship with them. It was founded for college students by a German boy, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2004. Originally it was a social network for students of Harvard University but then it became a hit on campus and expanded to other colleges. After a little soon, people all around the world use this exciting site to meet their friends, workmates, and other known people. You can find your friends by using search option and look their information and photos. After the easy register stage you can create your own profile. When you once add your friends to your own page, you can see their pages also and make a strong communication. This communication with family, friends and strangers, takes place via message ‘walls’, status updates and an email type message system. You can also see your friend’s emails and know about their job, family, city where they live.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008


It was a rainy day of November. Steven was looking out from her wife’s ward in the hospital. The light could not illuminate the street properly, only some children running along the street could be seen. They were laughing each other but wind was too strong to hear anything from outside. A little later the children disappeared in darkness. Steven sat the seat standing opposite of the bed and looked his wife, Barbara. Thinking the day when they met in a restaurant in San Francisco. They were waiting for this for nine months and now they had a baby of their own after looking other babies for livelihood for mouths. It would not be easy for them to bring up a child but it was their most important dream. Steven started to work in a bar and now he earned more and Barbara was a waitress but it is too difficult to make a living in San Francisco. Steven was thinking of this and what to do. He suddenly decided to move another city but then decided not to do. They had a house in there and jobs but they might not find them in another city. Suddenly Steven’s mobile phone rang, he tried to open it quickly not to wake up Barbara but she opened her eyes and looked around. Steven kissed her and went out of the room. It is Steven’s boss and asking when he could come to work again. After a short conversation, Steven entered the room. Barbara tried to take the flowers standing in a vase on the table. Steven ran and gave them to her and sat near her. She wanted him to give her glasses and read a few pages from book which was her best. After reading some pages, Steven noted that she was sleeping. He took his bag and went to entrance floor to talk with the doctor. He knocked the door and entered the room. The doctor was watching a program about UFO, he turned off the television and walked slowly to his trombone and started to wipe it. Steven started to bleat but suddenly the doctor took his head phone and called a man. He wanted him to discharge Barbara from hospital the following day. He turned to Steven and said “will you want this?” Steven could not say anything, he thanked and closed the door. He went to ‘check out’ to live and the nurse in front of the computer wrote his name and gave him a pay slip. It was too much for him to pay he called his best friend but he also had no money to give. His friend sold his notebook and sent the money to Steven so they could go their home. They were so happy for this baby and wanted to go home as soon as possible. They run across the road and then wanted to run another but in this second a car crashed them and except for baby the couple died