As a foreigner studying in Singapore, the most important thing is to learn correct English. This is not the first English language lesson I have taken in my study life in Singapore. However, I can say that this is the most interesting and meaningful English lesson. This is because that I have a fresh experience by having feedback from my classmates and my tutor for my every writing.
At the beginning of the course, all the students were divided into groups of four or five as the Blog group throughout the whole course. This is the first step of the collaborative studying journey in ES1102. For every post, including the draft of essay and draft of Reader Response, our group members will read through the others' post and give feedback, which includes grammar corrections, structure advice and some other suggestions. At the same time, the tutor also makes comments under every post.
This is indeed helpful and usefule to me when peers and the tutor give me feedback on my every writing. Reading through the comments made by my Blog menmbers, I can see the blind part of my thoughts about the essay. Some creative advice really helps me to improve my essay. On the other hand, the comments made by my tutor give me more professional suggestions. Some things we cannot obtain from our peers. Besides learning from those comments made by my peers and the tutor, when I do the same thing to my Blog members , I also learn a lot. By reading through others' essay or post, I have learnt new ideas and vocabularies. Analyzing some sentences carefully, it also helps me to improve my sentence structure and improves my analyzing skills at the same time. Besides all the good parts of others' posts, their mistakes are also worth learning. Reading their posts accompanying the comments from the tutor, I can see the mistakes much more clearly and this process also corrects me if there are some errors which I thought correct at first.
As I have mentioned at the above , peer and tutor's feedback is very useful in helping improve my writing skills. However, it also has to be clear that there is no need to accept every suggestion, especially from peers as it just a suggestion and our peers are learning from others as well. Their comments may be wrong sometimes. It also challenges me when should I take those advice.
In conclusion, this kind of learning process can be used in everywhere of my life. Listening to others advice and taking into consideration helps to improve my work. Similarly, when I help people do the same reviewing work, I also absorb the good parts of their work and avoid the same mistakes as well.
Thank you, JueTong, for this detailed reflection. You contextualize your study in ES1102 well, then you give a good overview of the way giving and receiving feedback has played a part in your learning process in the course. I especially appreciate this comment: "Listening to others advice and taking into consideration helps to improve my work. Similarly, when I help people do the same reviewing work, I also absorb the good parts of their work and avoid the same mistakes as well."
回复删除If I could learn more from you, I would want to know exactly what areas of the evaluative process you might be able to implement as you continue writing in English.
In any case, I thank you for your hard work this term and I wish you all the best as you continue your learning journey. :)