In this course, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) II, it is a four credit hour class for first year students. This course is for students whose first language is not English. In this class we have to write a narrative essay, an analytical essay, research essay and Final Digital Presentation Project. We also develop a critical thinking skill as we need to think about each topic given and write an essay on it. After every first draft we are supposed to do peer review and so it helps us improve our writing by looking at others work and helps us improves our skills of checking and giving feedback. We also learn about different writing styles like narrative, analytical and research writing which will be very helpful in the future. I like all the expects of this course as it is very interesting and we get to learn new things. Earlier when I started this course I did know English but I made errors while writing essay, like the sentence structure and grammatical errors I used to feel my writing I not up to mark and so would not be confident with it. But by the end of the 4 months’ semester now I started enjoying writing. Now, I can write with minimum grammar errors. I feel my vocabulary has also increased and gotten better from what I was 4 months’ earlier.
I feel I need to work on my Rhetorical Strategies (RS), I need to be effectively be able to address the audience, purpose, and voice with expertise through the use of a wide range of multilingual rhetorical strategies. I feel my writing lacks this and if I improve on this it would make my writing better. I also feel I need to work a little on my Organization (ORG), I need to strong, organize and use effective narrative structure while writing. I also need to have a good logical sequence for the points and paragraphs I make in my essay. The challenging part that I found was when we have to link two different texts and write one essay. Like recently we had to link any multimodal text to the Hofstadter’s text “The Shallowness of Google Translate”. It was a very interesting assignment but was also kind of challenging for me. I liked all the projects as they were different, but I found the Project 2, the analytic essay a little more difficult as we had to link two texts and write an essay. I feel it is very easy to navigate through the course information in the canvas site, as I always get all the notifications and emails if any new announcement or assignment is made. It also tells us about the deadlines we have and if we have submitted a particular assignment or not. I would like more help in comparing two or more different texts and finding out the common things between them. I really enjoyed the research writing as we could choose our own texts and multimodal texts on the topic that interests us.
We had many conference meetings with the professor after writing our first draft of our project, the conferences were very helpful as it helped us recognize our mistake and improve our writing as we got a lot of feedback which was useful to improve our final project. The revision process was actually nice, I liked it as if we did not like our first draft we could make changes a resubmit as our final project. I enjoyed all the writing process and they all were good or challenging in some way. The reading and prewriting process was a little more challenging as we had to think from the scratch and come up with ideas about what to write in our essays. I feel the drafting process was interesting as we could draft our opinion and mix and match different texts with our ideas. The revision process was the easiest for me as we already have a draft and ideas ready with us in our first draft, we also have feedback we got from our teacher and friends so I just had to rewrite some parts of the essay and add few things to make the essay better.
To the upcoming EAP II students this class is very fun and helps a lot to improve our vocabulary and writing style. We must just read all the texts closely and properly so we don’t miss any important points which can be an important point to write in our essay.