Being A Foreigner Speaking English As A Second Language

One thing I really liked about my writing class this year was the fact that Professor Olufs had the class read each other’s essays. I think that was a huge step for me because I was always embarrassed by how I wrote my essays. But through this process of writing, it had taught me that it is very important to have your peers or your instructor to revise your essay before you turn it in. It honestly made a huge improvement in my writing because it is a great way to see what they think about your essay. Sometimes they can offer some good ideas on how to improve. Since it’s from a different perspective they are easily able to point my mistakes. Having someone revise your essay is a great technique to do even if you revised it yourself. For instance, in my essay #4 which was about on “how do you learn a new skill relating it to tai chi” I revised it so many times before I

It's a regular Tuesday morning, just like any other. A Hispanic mother is called to the school for a meeting for a consultation about her son’s performance. While in the meeting, the principal tells her that her child is in the 2nd grade, but is very behind. He adds the fact that her child does not understand the language the teacher speaks, and consequently, is not learning. The mother feels helpless since she cannot help him by reason of not understanding the language either. Hence, this is the difficult reality for numerous Hispanic families.

I feel that the most important rose of multiculturalism is the “language rose.” The majority of Americans are monolingual. “Mastery of a second language enhances one’s mental mobility while enriching cultural insights and perspectives” (Parillo, 2005). If Americans were to learn a second language with the support from the Latino and Asian community, there would be a greater and richer culture. Growing up in America with English as my second language, I felt the pressure of making English my primary language. I did not embrace it until I got older and was more proud of my culture. I was first taught Vietnamese and did not even learn English until a couple of months before starting kindergarten. Vietnamese was the primary language that was spoken

As an American we have the right to exercise freedom of speech and I believe that freedom of speech is one of the most valuable rights we have, and I have not been able to exercise this right for the last 18 years of my life. I am most fortunate to be able to exercise this right in my English 1102 class during peer reviews. In my opinion, people learn best by teaching than they do by listening to the teacher and I believe peer reviews work the same way. When I was engaged in peer views, I learned more from my own writing than I ever have been reading my own reviews. I feel this is true because we are engaging in reading over another classmate’s paper, and offering our advice that could potentially improve their essays. For our first peer review our teacher gave us a list of guidelines to go by in order to do the most efficient job in peer review. It

I think one of the most useful forms of feedback a student can get is a paper with the professor’s notes all over it. If the student chooses to heed that feedback is their own prerogative. The study also addresses the effectiveness of model texts. I firmly agree that when it comes to poetry “‘seeing someone else do it … is very different from doing it yourself’”. Outside of the general format of the essay it can be very difficult to look at someone else’s work and figure out not only why it got the grade that it did but also how to incorporate those elements into your own work. In other subjects, however, model papers are much more useful. If a student is writing a research paper a model is good so, at the very least, they have an idea of the length but, a model paper has many more uses than just a reference for how long an assignment should be. It gives students an idea of the

Making sure your sentences are correct and error free is the most critical process in writing. Great ways to make sure your paper is solid is to re-read your essay. Having another set of eyes work on your essay is also a great way to find easily overlooked errors. The quickly fixed and missed errors add up, and end up costing you. While proofreading search for certain things in punctuation such as run-on sentences. Scan the essay for weak words such as good, a lot, things, and very. Proofreading my paper benefits me on everything I write. Employers might overlook resumes, when potential employees have constant errors on their application.

I need my paper to be easy to read, so I applied all these tools. The more I revised my writing, the more grammatical errors I corrected. After the first draft correction, I learn there were words I took for granted and used them in my essay that had a completely different meaning. I made generalized statements and did not attach much evidence to support most of the claims I noted in my writing. To improve my writing, I search the Internet to note other people’s remarks about these essays. Since I did not want to be embarrassed in front of my classmate for use of grammar, I had to read more to write more clearly. I did not like the peer review because it will allow my classmates to see my grammatical errors and would think of me to be a horrible English language person. But because of these peer reviews, I tried to make my text simple so that everyone could read and understand my writing.

Without having someone else to look over your work, it is hard to realize what you are doing wrong. When someone else reads your paper, especially having not read it before, they can easily identify your mistakes, whether it be punctuation or spelling errors. I strongly believe that when peer review is taken advantage of and used correctly, peer reviews are extremely helpful, but, unfortunately not everyone takes it serious and gives you the feedback that can really help you fix your essay.

Lastly, self-evaluation is a key component to writing an effective essay. Even though I was able to have student feedback for my essays; self-evaluation is important for me to be able to determine my strengths and weaknesses in my writing. After composing each essay I was required to compose a self-evaluation. The evaluations describe what I consider the strong points in the essay, and were I felt I still needed to

This is a reflection of my essay from module four where we did a peer review and feedback on our essay. I found this to be a really helpful and great assignment. It gave us an opportunity to have a peer doing the same type of essay give an outside view point. The feedback that I took into consideration from my peer was very valuable. I did not have a strong enough opposing viewpoint providing a negative view on censorship or a positive view of free speech. This was very good feedback and I feel that my peer definitely took the time to break down my essay and gave a great review. This was such an important part of the persuasive essay that the need to make sure I had a strong counter argument was important.

However, there were some things I needed to work on. When it was time for class peer review checks, I received the same criticism for each of my essays. Especially, for my first essay, that I though was perfect. My peers, and my professor

I simply wrote one draft without using any feedback from adults or peers. If I decided to use feedback on my piece, I know it would have been more beneficial to my development as a writer. On this piece I earned an 85%, in which I wasn’t satisfied with. From this, I was allowed to revise my piece, allowing me to go in depth into my writing to earn a better grade. Also, before submitting my revised essay, I asked my mom to read over my work to see if it would raise my grade. She gave me a few valuable pieces of advice that helped raise the grade on my essay to a 90%. From the Thematic Unit, I learned to improve my writing process to prepare myself for the future. At the end of the year, I was told to write my own essay about William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night novel, using my own writing process to be successful. My effective writing process included writing a first draft and completing self-assessment afterwards. The first step of my process helped me understand how my writing could develop into a stronger piece. After self-assessment, I wrote a second draft and had a peer review my work. Finally, I made a third and final draft in order to present the best version of my writing. As shown from the Soliloquy Essay, my writing process is

Vocabulary plays a significant role in English as second language learning process. For the majority of English as Second Language(ESL) learners, the ultimate goal of learning the language is to understand (read and listen) and communicate (write and speak) with little difficulty and the lack of sufficient vocabulary may be the constraint of such goal (Folse, 2004). As the bedrock of English and as well as language, vocabulary also facilitates the development of other language skills: lexical richness leads to the progress in the use of language, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing skills (Nation, 1994). Reversely, The improvement in such skills may enhance learners vocabulary size as the exposure to more learning materials improves the capacity to acquire new vocabulary. (The importance of learning vocabulary/ why vocabulary?)

ESL students are students that speak English as a second language. Presently, there is many different system to characterize this type of students (qtd in Shi, Steen 63). For example, they can be seen as “English Language Learners (ELL), English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), English Language Development (ELD), English Language Service (ELS), and

For me, learning a language is a complicated process. It is different from learning other subjects. It involves a lot of practices and follow up. When I talk about my personal experience, I would say that I have a rich experience in learning English as a second language. English was taught to me for ten years starting from grade seven till graduation from university. After graduation, I felt that I should improve my language skills. Therefore, I did a lot of efforts personally to increase my fluency. Until now I still learn the language. Indeed, learning a language takes a lifetime.