Reflective Essay
This class has been very educational and beneficial for me. I felt like our professor created a very friendly and positive environment. I feel like class is a safe space where I will not be judged for asking questions and I never felt nervous to raise my hand and express my opinion. My English has improved so much over the past few months that I have been in this class and I highly recommend that people who do not speak English as their first language to take this class!
What I found most interesting in this class was the part where we discussed run on sentences, sentence fragmentation and comma splices. I looked back on some of my previous essays from last semester and I noticed that those are some of my biggest drawbacks. Moreover, the whole notion of “signal phrases” was very interesting and I went online and found a whole list of traditional signal phrases that include: “additionally”, “moreover”, “furthermore”, etc. I believe that such words are very useful because regardless of the type of paper, these phrases always help the transition from each paragraph and polish up an essay because they sound very fancy.
I also really liked the collocations dictionary that I used. In fact, I found the word “regardless” that I used two sentences ago in a collocation dictionary. When it came to the vocabulary this semester, I found that making vocabulary cards was helpful, but I struggles to find the Hindi word for a lot of the words that made cards for. I eventually omitted (I found the word “omit” on a collocation dictionary that also offered synonyms, let’s hope this is in the correct context!) the section from my flash cards that included finding the Hindi word for the English words. I feel to some extent that actually finding the Hindi equivalent of the English word did not do the English word justice because the comparisons between the two languages is too difficult. There are so many English words that do not have proper Hindi meanings and so many Hindi words that do not have English meanings. Also, I feel like when I am learning a new language, I like to get develop my skills in that language by pretending that I am a child and learning that language as if it is my first language.
Additionally, one thing that I did this semester is that I found some of the readings that I had to do online and then I used a feature on my laptop to have the readings get read aloud to me and then I could listen to it and at the same time read the text and it was very helpful.
One thing that I did struggle a bit with in this unit were the exercises that had the adv+verb to adj.+noun transformation. I feel like it is a very mechanical way to explain the topic and I do struggle a lot when it comes to identifying parts of speech, especially when so many different tenses are involved in the English language. I found that listening to other people speak English really helps me, hence I enjoy listening to the readings that have to be done get read out to me.
Lastly, the segment of the class spent on paraphrasing and summarizing was really intriguing because I am not too sure about what counts as academic dishonesty and what must be in quotations. So having the time to understand how to take a piece of writing and then present it in your own words and still acknowledging that the idea is not your was very wonderful to learn. I find that depending on what area of knowledge the paper is in, the amount of language that is considered to be shared language would vary. For example, in public health class, there is a lot of shared language when I am paraphrasing theories from scientists; on the other hand, in my history class, it was more easy for me to find synonyms for a lot of the words that I wanted to cite and I could easily write about the same concept in my own words.
These are some of the things that really stood out for me in the first unit of my College Writing class.