Critical Reflection on ES1102

There are a few things that I have realised by the end of this module. Firstly, it is not embedded in my genes to be eloquent in English. Secondly, and more importantly, that inadequacy does not matter as long as I am willing to learn and improve myself. But letting myself to be thrown into the fire was hard. The learning journey throughout this course was arduous for me. I had, and is still having, a hard time trying to construct proper sentence structures and find the right words to use. Ironically during the course, we had to provide feedbacks for our peers' writings, which made me question my qualification to do so. But it was a good exercise because we became more conscious of our mistakes and we learned something new from others.

Apart from the opportunity to learn from our peers, the course itself has offered a systematic learning framework where we learned the science of writing. I was being introduced to grammar forms which I did not knew existed before. Upon learning them, it has made my writings more structured and readable.

Despite the things that I have learned, I am still far from being a good writer. I still find myself struggling to come up with a quality essay draft within a short period of time. I am particularly concern about this since that will be the kind of situation that we will be facing in the final exam. Perhaps the best ways to improve myself before the exam is to practice writing on paper more and to read more journals and reviews. These will allow me to mentally prepare myself.

Of course, my English learning journey does not end after the finals. I will make the conscious effort to keep improving because after all, it is really not about the genes.

Reflection on Presentation

I find the presentation exercise useful and relevant, as it is a platform for me to practice and enhance my public speaking skills. It is especially meaningful because the modules offered in my major do not provide sufficient presentation opportunities.

While I support the proposal of including this element into the course in the next semester, I feel that it would be best to revise the module outline. It would be more beneficial for the presentation exercise to be scheduled in the middle of the semester instead of at the end. The reason being, students would more likely be willing to attend classes in the middle of the semester whereby there would be less assignment deadlines for other modules. This would allow the presenters to pitch their ideas to a large group of people.

I am certain that the inclusion of the presentation exercise will be beneficial to students who are taking this module in the future.