My English
Learning Journey
I never knew
the importance of basics until I took the Qualifying English Test (QET) and
subsequently the ES1000 English Course last semester, where I realized that my
foundation of English was weak and I was far behind the rest of the cohort. Coming
from a Chinese speaking background, my command of English tends to be weaker than
those who speak English daily. Moreover, the chances of speaking English
in school with my peers were limited in the past as we communicated mostly in
mandarin. Hence I was not able to improve much over the past few years.
I did not learn my basics well in the past, whereby our English teacher focused on quantity work over quality work. She threw
us with many English essays to train us on our writing skills, however, without the
fundamental skills on essay writing, such as topic sentence, supporting
sentence and concluding sentence, I was not able to deliver a good piece of work. And before
I was able to learn from my mistake, another new piece of work was then given
to train us on the next set of skills. Therefore, with such fast pace. I was not able to learn from
the mistake. Then,
I went on to an engineering course in a Polytechnic after finishing my
secondary education. Essay writings were no longer important because we focused
on technical writing whereby content and data were far more important than
language skills, hence I did not pay much attention to the grammar and sentence
structure while writing reports.
However, I learnt a lot from the English Module I attended
last semester. Not only the lecturer was passionate in teaching and helping his
students, he made sure that his students learnt from their mistakes so that
they would not repeat the same mistake in the next assignment. But definitely
there is still room for improvement, for instance my reading and text editing
skills. This is most probably is due to the lack in vocabulary, thus causing me to have difficulty understanding the passage.
And in order for me to make improvement, I would have to read up more
and expose to more vocabulary and different writing styles.