Review on ES2007

The module equipped me with many useful skills including presentation skills, teaching skills, communication skills as well as interpersonal skills, Frankly speaking, I took a very long time to overcome my mental challenge in taking this module. English is always my weakness and I am lazy in remembering the vocabularies and learning grammar of English. I always believe that the best way to master a language is to practice it in the real life.

However, I have to admit that I have trained myself English for over 4 years, I felt my English is improving in a very slow progress. Thus, I felt that a module which could train my English language skills such as communication skills is very necessary for me currently. As a result, I decided to choose ES2007S.

After taking up this module, it turned out that taking an English module would not be always boring or tough; at least this class did not leave any impression like that. The class was very interesting and interactive. Dr Radihka will always deliver the knowledge to us humorously. The atmosphere of class would always be harmonious and many interesting videos and stories was shown and told to us in class. I felt like the knowledge of communication skills was taught to me subconsciously from various channels. Unlike any other modules, the lecture notes were only used as a guide in class instead of the essential teaching material. Many kinds of communication skills were taught to students via many practical exercises such as peer teachings, group discussions or formal presentations. With the help from lecturer and classmate, I was able to review the flaws in my presentation skills and other forms of communication skills. Be aware of all those flaws will help me do much better in the daily communications.  Besides the communication skills training, the module also introduced us very useful job-seeking skills such as interview skills, resume writing trick and application letter writing technique. Armed with all these skills relief the pressure on me of looking for job, meanwhile, it increased my confidence and helped me pass through many rounds of interviews.  All in all, this module is amazing in improving my communication skills. It actually has achieved in changing students from passive learners into self-initiated learners and make students highly participated in the class. I have to say this module really is my best choice among my 4 years biding history.

However, there are just my own suggestions on the class. As I am year 4 students, taking this module in semester two, therefore, I may encounter the problem that the career fair was organized in February which was the beginning of the semester and all the soft-skills required were only taught to us in the middle or late part of the semester. Therefore, maybe the module could change the sequence of content teaching in order to help year 4 students in dealing with all job-finding situations. Furthermore, as Dr Radihka mentioned that the networking skills is not included in the current syllabus, but I personally feel that the networking skills is very important in job-finding especially NUS now will hold up several networking event for students such as suit up, thus it is essential to know how and what students could talk with their future employers.  Therefore, giving more practices to students about how to network with your potential future employer is quite necessary during the course.

Lastly I would like to express my gratitude to all my classmates for your encouragements and suggestions, they really means a lot during my studies and I want to specially thank all my teammates, Denial, Jennifer and Selena, thank you all for the understanding and helping me in my English. I know how hard to edit my written English, thank you all for the great help and all the efforts you guys put in. Lastly, I want to show my greatest gratitude to Dr Radihka, thank you very much for the encouragements from the first day until now and you always are patient in offering me help and answering all my questions regardless how lame my questions were. You are really an awesome teacher and I truly appreciated to have you as my teacher.

Review on my oral presentation skills

Before reviewing my presentation skills, I watched several TED speeches. One of the speech made by a North Korean speaker strike me the most. Although I have to say, she is not so proficient in speaking English. She was telling us the story of how she escaped from North Korea with her obvious Korean accent. However, I was touched by her story and impressed by the way of her presenting. She stood on the stage still, talked with the moderate speed and delivered her story naturally, confidently with all her feelings. From the speech, I start to review my oral presentation skills.

As getting the feedback from my classmates and Dr. Radhika. The first problem in my presentation skills is I was talking too fast when I was presenting. One of the reasons of I am talking fast may be I am speaking in a fast path in Mandarin, when I speak another language, I have the intention to speak it as fast as the path in my Mandarin speaking. Furthermore, I naively believed that when I am talking fast, people will only catch my critical words and do not pay attention on my grammar mistakes or other defects while I am speaking English. Nevertheless,   I forgot to consider when I am talking fast, I am not able to pronounce each single vocabulary clear. It is very frustrated when you know someone is presenting in English, but you do not understand what he is saying, as all the words are sticked to each other and each pronunciation is blurry and you have to put a lot of efforts in guessing the content of his speech.  Hence, I will slow down my path of speaking and pronounce every word correctly and clearly  during the presentation. 

Another problem in my presentation is that I could not articulate a sentence concisely with my limited vocabularies and grammar background. Thus, it is inevitable that the repetition of the words using will be revealed in my presentation.  Hence, in order to overcome such difficult, I will try to extend my vocabularies meanwhile, to learn the basic grammar and how to connect words together fluently. Once my English background is adequate enough to handle the daily conversation. I am confident that I can have a better articulating sentences during the presentation 

Lastly, I believe I am still doing something good during the presentation. I would like to look at my audience during the presentation, as I hope to get the feedback from their facial expressions. My voice projection should be my strength in my presentation since I learnt how to project my voice to the last row of audience when I was performing in a Chinese Drama. 

In conclusion, the audience would can have eye contacts with me during my presentation. They can hear me as well, but with a fast path talking speed. Although some sentences were not constructed naturally and they may be sounded oddly sometimes, the point of my delivery can still be received by audience. These not-well structured sentences would not affect the presentation too much. To sum up, there will be a lot things I need to work on in future, meanwhile, I need to secure all strengths in my presentation skills, then improve all the weaknesses we have mentioned. I am sure with more efforts input, my presentation skills will be getting better and better.      

This is the website of escape from North Korea

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdxPCeWw75k
I also attach another link which introduced how a chinese PHD become a one of famous talk show actors--Huang xing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buSv1jjAels