Final reflection on learning

Now it has come to the end of the course . Or perhaps it might be  only the beginning for us to  put all the knowledge that we have learnt into practice and become them one day.

In this course I found that my writing skill has improved dramatically compared to the way it was 3 months ago. This improvement is attributed to the amount of writing practices that we have employed through  various activities such as writing blog posts, writing lesson plan, the cover letter and resume , meeting minutes, proposal and emails to respective stakeholders.

Frankly, I enrolled into this course with the initial speculation that there would be a lot of discussions and verbal communications involved. However, I was taken by surprise to notice that there were also many writing tasks too. And I had to say it was such an enjoyable surprise .Since English is my second language and although I am required to write a fair bit in my course, personally I found that my writing skill hardly improved over the past year. Personally I guessed it was because I did not receive detailed feedbacks on my writings .Due to time constraint, learning has been one-directional most of the time. My tutors were  way too  busy  finishing the lesson requirement  and could not afford to correct each student on trivial shortcomings  such as wrong grammar or poor choice of vocabulary .These small  factors, if accumulated over time would  greatly affect the overall performance of the assignment. Nevertheless, I was also way ignorant to be able to eveluate my writing objectively. As a matter of fact, I have been repeating the same mistakes again in my writing  without noticing them.

In this class, having been introduced to the 7 C standard, I started to form a habit of asking  what is the purpose of my writing, does it sound coherent? Is it concise ? Is it clear?I find  these guideline questions are extremely useful in writing a good piece of essay. Furthermore through evaluating other’s work, I was exposure to a diverse range of writing styles from which I gradually withdrawn some useful tips of writing and build up my vocabulary.

I also like the lighthearted manner in which writing was infused into the course curriculum. Despite the  heavy workload, many  interactive activities such as  class discussions, peer feedbacks, peer teaching  etc  in replacement to thick textbooks and daunting compulsory readings required in conventional courses  have made  this class  much more pragmatic and enjoyable.

Lastly, it was the open-minded and mutual respective culture in classroom that helped me to express my ideas freely without being so self-conscious  about making mistakes. I would also like to express my gratitude to the facilitator-Brad and all of my beloved classmates for making ES2007S such a memorable experience.