During the course of ES1102, I received lots of help from my peers and
Brad. Peers and Tutor’s feedback in comments, works’ editing, and even everyday speaking
provide me lots of opportunities to imitate. I believe imitation is also a good way of
practicing a language, for non-English first language speakers like me. I learned English in a structural manner back in
primary school, namely vocabularies, grammars and sentence structures. Thus,
imitation is a similar process of learning like what I have done in the past. Even though that peer’s feedback might not
be entirely correct, as they are currently in our same English class seeking an
improvement in their English proficiency, I
was confident that they were better than me.
I believe my
peers have taken the responsibility to provide responsible and legit feedback.
As I
have mentioned at the beginning of this course, I
am at the bottleneck of my English
learning journey. Each time I write my essays and do in-class activities, I do
still felt stuck at my language processing. I
have to construct the sentences in my
brain for few seconds prior to speaking out or to writing on documents. Therefore at each time I write an assignment, I tend
to go through peers and tutor’s feedback thoroughly, tried very hard to break
down the elements in their comments and tried hard to apply in my writings.
Moreover, I imitate others’ writing by
looking at each of their blogs so that my final products could at least be produced at a better quality. After reading
through others’ blog posts, I find all their writings are superior to mine in
terms of complexity, accuracy and organization. I
did feel extremely frustrated about my
deteriorating proficiency in English especially during English class.
However, Brad was extremely patient in showing
me on how to rectify my silly mistakes each time. His comments and
suggestions on the word document were so helpful that I immediately realized my
mistakes and be able to finally know what I have been committing so far. Brad’s critical feedback including
grammatical errors, contents, essay organization and even citation formats,
made me realized how badly I have done but at the same time I know exactly how
to improve. I might not be able to score
as high as others, but this course has allowed me
to realize my mistakes and to correct
them before entering the society as a worker. The writing skills and analytic
skills where we were repeatedly trained during
our class activities, and assignments
were extremely helpful in making my
expressions clearer. Brad mentioned that I
was able to speak normally while making
perfect senses, yet my writing has
crippled my expression abilities by hindering others to understand my ideas. As the course goes along, I found my
writing has become more understandable,
and I can better illustrate my ideas. I
am grateful for Brad’s detailed teaching,
and I earned my most benefits from this course.
Thanks for this well focused reflection, Zijian. I appreciate the heart-felt way you have chosen to discuss your own evolving writing. It's good that you have highlighted that through the module, especially with my help and that of your peers, you have developed an awareness of what makes more effective writing, what some of your weak points in writing are and how you might make an improvement. It's also especially good to know that you feel that you can imitate some of the structures that you have found in others' work. I don't doubt this, and for this reason I'd suggest that if you really ever need to write at a higher level in English, you should start reading more in English now.
返信削除In any case, I really appreciate all the effort you have made this term. It's been a pleasure working with you. All the best in your future!