Advanced Reading, Writing, and Grammar

Reflective Essay of Portfolio

            Since the very beginning of the MEI 004C class, I didn’t know how to write something effectively in English although all my life is always connected with writing. This is because I don’t familiar with English and also, I live in the country that English is a second language. However, 3 months later, I feel like I’m a new person who can use better English than the past. For a whole semester, I did many things in the class that helped me to improve my English skills. The very last homework that I had done for this course was a writing portfolio, which I had to collect almost all my works for a whole semester. From this homework, I can see many beneficial things to my life.

            First of all, I can see an improvement from my works since the past to the present. At the first time, when I heard that I had to write something about myself as a writer, or some topics that I’m not familiar with, I usually spent almost of my entire night to complete that work. Although I had many ideas in my head, it was really hard for me to write down in English. However, after tons of writing works I had written during class or even my homework, I felt better when teachers told me to write an essay because I was getting use to it. Also, the length of an essay is much longer than early works.

Second, I had learned how to improve my work by peer and self assessment. Every time after I had written an essay, I had to evaluate a score, and most of the time when I knew my score from self and peer assessment, I felt upset about it because it was so low. It was always lower than the score that I had expected. A few days after I started to know how assessment worked, I realized that what I always lack was an organization. I began to know what my weakness was. As a result, I tried to focus on my weakness for next works, and it worked. I made fewer mistakes in my late works. I think an assessment helps me to focus what my weakness is.

Lastly, I had learned about how to use A.P.P.L.E. in writing process. From my opinion, it is very useful for me because I can analyze and focus my work to audiences. This is very important because if you can catch the awareness of the audience, your work will not be boring. Before I can analyze this point, I had to practice lots of reading in order to know and understand the possibility of audiences. From this point, it shows that if you want to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader as well. I had learned that reading and writing, also thinking, are parallel. Moreover, it can tell me about many important things to concern for example, a type of Presentation, Language and Evidence used in an essay. With this strategy, I can make my writing work more interesting.

In sum, I think a writing portfolio is a great summary of a student because it contains writing history of that student. For a whole course, I had done lots of writings and I chose some of them to be parts of my portfolio. The reason that I chose those writings is, I want the teacher to see my improvement since the very first class to my very last class. I think I had improved a lot not only as a writer, but also as a student who doesn’t have English as a first language.

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