MY ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING JOURNEY
Since Primary 1, i started learning the English language and i had been learning it for a total of 12 years. It can be said as one of the language which impacted me the most and one that i aspired to excel at . Being born into a Chinese Speaking family, my journey throughout these 16 years had not been a smooth one mainly due to lack of practice in speaking the language.
In Primary School, we were first exposed to comprehension where we had to read the passage and answer some questions based on the text . I enjoyed myself doing that as i find it a thrill reading between the passage looking for the correct answers. Hence, i excelled in that during my Primary School days. However, Composition was something that i dreaded as i constantly had to rack my brains to think of new content to write and there was a need to ensure that it does not go out of point and that the sentence structure was correct. This proved to be a chore which i disliked doing and did badly as a result.
Moving on to Secondary School, i still enjoyed doing comprehension even though i was being presented with tougher passages and somehow i just managed to pull through and enjoyed the whole process thoroughly. i was also first introduced to the idea of Summary where we had to understand the key ideas of a few paragraphs and summarise it in less than a designated number of words. This proved to be a easy task for me as i learned the skills in doing such questions . However, composition proved to be a more tedious chore as i learnt more technical skills of essay writing. There were things like topic sentence, linking sentence and concluding sentence which i could not really grasp the significance of it and hence i was often penalised and scored badly at it . I managed to scrape through and went on to a Junior College.
During Junior College, most of the writings written were mainly argumentative essays and i was required to read widely in order to come up with ideas for my essay writings. Once again, i went through the same process and i never really understood why i did not do well for my essay writing. I did not fully understand why i could not do well for essay writing and had to go through many obstacles in the process. Hence, i was not surprised when i had to take QET ( Qualifying English Test) when i came to university. Initially , i was rather disappointed when i realised that i had to take an extra english module as i did not clear my QET. After thinking through , i have decided to look at it positively and treat it as a blessing in disguise which could allow me to conquer my essay writing problems once and for all. I am looking forward to learn as much as i can from Dr Misty Cook, my English Professor for ES1102 and hopefully i am able to improve my writing skills after these 12 weeks.
