Week 1 Reflection

My name is Li Yujie. You can call me Alan. I am a second-year undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine. Now, I am majoring in Economics. I come from Xiamen, China. I am interested in study the economics phenomenon. Besides, I continue to explore more areas and try different things. I love coral and photography.

Before 39A, I took Academic English 20C. AcEng 20C mainly focuses on learning grammar and teaching us some essential English academic writing skills, such as paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, researching, etc. Thanks to AE20C, the instructor pushed me to pay more attention to grammar, which reduces most grammar mistakes. When I wrote the summary, I did not know how to organize those paragraphs, and I just shortened every single section and patched them together without any logic. Then, the professor gave us many samples, so I started to read them and modify their way to write the summary. After that, I learned how to organize a summary paper. It just like we tell a story to the audience. So, the most important thing is that we need to understand the article fully. Meantime, my reading skill has improved, which is one of the important factors. When I was reading the article, I will draw a mind map to connect each paragraph logically. This way helps me save much time I spend on summary paper because when I finish skimming through an article, I can clearly know the logic. Then, I will organize my paper according to the logic I find. This is a really important skill because when I was doing my research paper, I could easily understand those papers and articles.

The main problem is that my research paper is not so concise. I will include many unnecessary parts in my paper.

The main problems I made when I was doing the Language and Grammar Diagnostic at Connect is Using punctuations, subject-verb agreement, and independent clause.

We think the best part I did was to judge fragment, fused sentence, and unclear pronoun reference. Ae20c helped me solve these grammatical problems last semester. The instructor let us practice a lot of summarizing and paraphrasing and let us judge our grammar problems and correct them. Gradually, I was able to subconsciously pay attention to these grammatical problems in later writing and ensure that these problems would not appear in my writing.

Course objectives are to help us improve our reading ability and the ability to extract information and integrate. At the same time, it helps students learn writing skills. The most important thing is to help students develop good habits and become effective communicators.

Grade contract aims to help students shift their attention from getting high grades or getting teacher approval to writing itself. Through this contract, students will conduct many self-assessments by themselves, and students must evaluate each other and make suggestions. In this way, students can master the ability to judge what a good article is.