Telephoning: Opening a call & Taking message

It is very important to illustrate your purpose and let the person who answers your phone can have complete information why you are calling. Here are some tips on calling/answering the phone.

Answer a phone:

Hello, ABC company, Financial Dept. Shelley's speaking.
Yes, this is Statistic Dept.

When you want to know who is calling:

Who is calling please?
May I know what is the connection with?
May I ask what it is reference to?

*******

Calling: 

When you make a call, you should include basic information while you're calling

External call: Company name, Dept. name, and your name.
Internal call: Dept. name and your name.
Then, tell your connector and purpose.

Hello, this is Shelley from ABC company.

May I speak to...
Could you please put me through...
The reason what I'm calling is
I'm calling about....

To leave a message:

Should be able to get a message to John.
Would you like to leave a message?

May I leave a message?
Could you take a message, please?

While waiting:

Just a second / Just a moment
Getting it! (Means you are writing on paper right now)

Ask for reconfirm:

Can you read that back to me?
Let me read that back to you.
So let me make sure that I get the name right.

EPE-Case study: Class Size and Academic Achievement (II)

This is an essay for academic preparation course. I'd like to have it been reviewed and welcome everyone's comments, especially on grammar and structure, thank you.

Is the class size relative to better academic achievement?

To experiment with a specific outcome, in the late 1980s, a Tennessee-sponsored project called “Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio”, or “STAR” was designed to measure students’ performance through widened sample size and exclude the influence factors, such as students’ family background, the ratio of native English speaker. STAR use a different way to optimize the study result, which was assigned students and teachers randomly in different class size. Project STAR continued for four years and analysts conducted multiple records; generally, students have significant improvement in the first grade, even maintained the same performance after they have gone back to large class. Also, another notable result showed that ethnic minority students jumped in achievement impressively compared to previous records.
However, the other analysts have different view, they criticised that the study result did not provide clear evidence of the correlation between good performance and small class size. Despite the fact that, there was consensus among excellent students’ performance when they studied in a class with student number between thirteen to seventeen.

In spite of those remarkable finds related to the merits of small class size, different education styles implementing in Asia tell different stories in contrast to the benefits of small class size. For a long time, Asian schools kept large class size for each grade, usually more than forty students in one class, which is different from American schools, especially Japanese students, who hold the most remarkable achievement records. Those students highly disciplined and honored to be chosen. The teachers have strong established relationship with students. Although the flexibility in large class is not as much as it is in small class, some records showed that without considering the factors of linguistic and culture diversities, Japanese students can still hold high scores under standard test. 

Vancouver Life: Study and immigration

2 months ago, I finally decided to actualize my dream, to live in Vancouver, a city I fell in love since first time I visited, and to achieve my academic goal.

2 months later, the situations changed so fast and I can only try to grab every possible opportunity. To Apply to those so called "suitable" University is extremely giving me hard time, because of my uncompleted college degree, I only had senior high school graduated transcription, plus 2 years college Diploma.

















Eventually, 2 famous University here: University of Victoria, Vancouver, BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology). I was so glad that I can get into these acceptance letters, but later I realized the fact: there are too many Universities and college here, and Vancouver is an immigrants city, these academic programs are specifically designed for the international students and those people who want to immigrate here.

When my life came to this stage, I should really carefully outweigh both my desire and economical side of the future life.

It was difficult for me to make a decision between immigration purpose and go back my home country to find a job. Suddenly, it just liked someone lit a spotlight on me, there is an interest of mind, but for long time, I pursued something else and forgot it. Just at this moment, I saw it!

Interpreter, this is an amazing job for me and because of my passion on English, which is contributed to this interest. I am fortunate enough, there are 2 Universities run relevant programs: Business translation of Chinese - English. I truly believed that if a window was closed, God will open another window for me, only if I can find it and see the view through that window, future is brighten!

I'd like to share this experience because, there are so many international students here in Vancouver, no matter what purpose they have, go to Universities, immigration, working, or just want to stay aboard for a while, the first step is the most important thing, you have to be there than you know what exactly you want.

Don't be afraid, at least you've tried. Don't regret, because what you experiencing here is priceless.

St. Patric Festival, Vancouver

Granville Island Market, Vancouver

The most cheery flowers I've ever seen

2個月前，我終於決定實現我的夢想，到溫哥華住並完成我的學術目標，一個我在拜訪第一次之後就愛上的城市。

2個月之後，不斷改變的狀態讓我只能抓住任何申請大學的機會，一個我真的適合去唸的學校。整個申請過程真的很辛苦，因為我只有台灣五專的學歴，而不是完整的大學學歴。

最終，2間有名的大學，維多莉亞大學和BC省技術學院接受了我有條件式的入學。我很高興能夠拿到入學許可，但是隨後我就發現，溫哥華的大學很多，而溫哥華是一個移民居多的城市，多數的學術課程都是專門為了國際學生或是想移民的人設計的。

人生到了這種階段，我應該要小心考慮“想要”和未來生活的經濟效益的問題。

要在移民和回到自己國家找工作是對我來說很困難的決定。不過突然間，似乎有人打亮了燈光，我發現了自己長久以來一直都有的興趣，但是因為我一直在追求其它的事情而被遣忘了。

翻譯員，對於在英文上很有熱情的我而言是一件很棒的工作，而十分有幸的，有2間大學正好就有開設這門中英文翻譯課程。我相信，上帝永遠會在一扇窗關上後，再為你開另一扇窗，只要你能夠找到它，就能看到未來明亮的風景。

我想分享這個經驗是因為溫哥華有許多的國際學生，不管他們的目的是為了什麼，上大學，移民，工作或是只是想要待在國外一陣子，踏出第一步是很重要的，你需要真的到當地了，才知道自己想要的是什麼。

別怕，至少你試了。別後悔，你學到的經驗是無價的。

EPE-Case study: Class Size and Academic Achievement (I)

This is an essay for academic preparation course. I'd like to have it been reviewed and welcome everyone's comments, especially on grammar and structure, thank you.

Is the class size relative to better academic achievement?

The importance of education is the core value of all human society. Thus, how to improve the performance of students is the heated subjects of endless debate. When class size is mentioned, most studies refer to 20 students as a small class, and a large one is more than 20. In Asia, large class size is common for every level of school. In the elementary school that I studied, the classroom was usually full of approximately sixty students. Under this situation, our teacher did not give us any free time to discussion nor provide feedback for individuals. The whole school year followed by tight schedule; standard and frequent examinations were the effective ways to test student’s performance. As a result, students tried hard to continue high scored, otherwise, harsh punishment would occur. Considered the improvement academic achievement, there is common consensus among the beneficial ways of class-size reduction in many countries. To be sure, there have been numerous studies in the U.S. concentrating on this topic. This essay will discuss the relative benefits of both small and large class sizes.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to students’ performance. Overtime, the performance of students is widely better as a result of class-size reduction; numerous studies also indicated those benefits following by reducing the class size.  According to these conducts, some major key points are worth to be addressed as: more interaction between students and teachers, encouraging group discussion and these students are more likely to become healthier in their later lives.
First of all, unlike large classes, fewer students in class can avoid interruption from peers, and also give teachers more opportunities to focus on individually. Students are encouraged to team up together and have more discussions, which not only gives teachers more room of flexibility, but it also modifies education style by the ways of examining the students closely. Meanwhile, because the students are well educated, they may have sufficient knowledge to maintain healthy lives and avoid unnecessary medical cost.
In addition, some analysts agreed that those students in kindergarten prosper good study habits and it is likely to persist for long time. However, as maintained by existing records showed that since 1969, over 28 years, the United States has experienced relative decrease in student-teacher ratios dramatically, despite a negligible increase in academic performance.