Critical Reflection

Throughout my Effective Communication journey, I have seen myself gaining more confidence with English each time I step into Professor Brad's class. When the module first began, I set a primary goal to overcome my public speaking anxiety and be more confident to express my thoughts to an audience. At the start, having to work in different groups with strangers gave me anxiety. However, through these consistent interactions, I was able to practice my interpersonal skills and build up my confidence progressively. The peer-review analysis used in this module has helped me identify my weaknesses and mistakes and learn from them based on my peer's feedback. In completion of the assignments, I have learnt the proper format and structure of writing a summary, email and technical report. The summary assignment made me pay more attention to ensuring that the cited information has the APA style format. Additionally, the instructional unit and paired activities prior to the assignment allowed me to practice my paraphrasing and summarising skills with the class and learned from the feedback given. This has benefitted me greatly as it cleared my doubts and gave me a better understanding of the nature and scope of plagiarism.

The greatest challenge in the module was the research and design proposal report. At the start of the project, my team kept running into obstacles such as being unable to find a product in the market that could be improved. When we thought that we had found the ideal product, we realised that our improvement ideas weren't feasible and are undesirable. So, my team had to find a new product. We eventually settled on one after much consideration and learning from our past mistakes. Through this, I learned the purpose of having an ideal, gap and goal as it helped me identify the improvement required to attain an ideal product. I have also grasped the importance of communicating effectively in a team to get my ideas across and ensure that everyone is in sync. For the project's presentation, I am delighted with myself as I am able to maintain eye contact with the audience and spoke confidently with a clear, loud tone compared to the mock presentation, in which I stuttered a lot and was reading off my phone. I recognise that there are many areas I am lacking in and will continuously try to improve them, starting with better pacing and showing more enthusiasm when speaking. Overall, for the presentation, I learned that we should not memorise a script but instead be knowledgeable about the topic. For the slides, I learned about the parallel structure in bullet point and to not overload the slides with words.

All in all, this module has benefited me in many ways. In the past, I have always thought that being in engineering does not require good use of English as my reports were graded just for their content and not based on my languages use. I was never taught the proper format and structure to write a technical report. But after attending these 13 weeks of the module, I was able to put together a professional technical report with my team and improve myself in terms of language writing and presentation skills. I'm sure that all that I have learned in this module will be etched into my mind for years. I want to take this opportunity to thank Professor Brad for making the module enjoyable and, most importantly, for all his constant guidance that made it possible for me to attain my goals. I am also thankful to my teammates in GreenGoers for going through the research and design project journey with me.