2015年4月10日金曜日

Critical Reflection on The Role of Peer and Tutor Feedback

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. 

1 件のコメント:

  1. 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.

    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!

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