Academic English Reflection

In order to discuss my reflections on my performance this semester in terms of using academic English, I would like to break it into four parts in order to have a more specific and deeper discussion: the ability of reading and doing research on academic scholarly resource, academic writing ability, listening, and speaking. My performance in GPS, Writing and POH has demonstrated my enthusiasm and constant efforts on reading and writing. My comprehension ability and writing level have improved significantly since I entered NYU Shanghai, which can also be considered as my strengths in comparison to other skills. Reflective writing, which has been practised most frequently during the EAP course, is more focused on the logic of reflection rather

My performance on the listening test is very unstable, and similar things happened in previous EAP classes as well. I performed well in our first listening practice taken at the beginning of this semester. However, my performance of our midterm listening exam was unsatisfactory. Once I was under pressure, I felt distracted when I was listening. In the past midterm, I believed that I missed some important points at the beginning of the talk, which added me great difficulties to recognize the structure of the talk. Though Austrian accent is a little harder for a non-native English language speaker to understand, I blame my disappointing performance on failing to grasp the overall structure and the topic of each section. It is nearly impossible for me to understand the talk wholeheartedly when the only thing I can do is to piece each separate sentence together. My listening strategy is to get the central idea first and find its supports in the lecturer’s speech. Sometimes it works well, but once I fail to get the central idea at the beginning, I will be quite panicked and it turns out to be an incomplete understanding with the lack of some main ideas. So far in this course, Prof. Capario has been constantly pushing us to practice our listening with various listening materials, but I believe that it will be even helpful if we can have those kind of listening homework in the format of exam. Because when doing the

Capario, there is one question attracts to me most, --”What have you learned in this course that will help you continue to grow as a student at NYU Shanghai”. As a STEM students, this content-based course makes me aware of the significance of science communication and has totally convert my opinions on science discussion happened in the public sphere. Besides, both the videos and essays provide me with some practical suggestions on how to carry out science communication. Previously, I belonged to a group of most “conceited” STEM students who hate writing boring lab reports and believe that it is not scientists’ duty to communicate science to the public, and scientific discussions should be kept among people who possess the ability to fully understand it. This month, however, when I apply to NYU Shanghai Dean Undergraduate Research Funding, I was required to write my proposal in a way that not only people in the engineering domain can understand, but also an educated newspaper reader can interpret the significance of my research and the overall scheme of my research design. In my proposal, what I have learnt in this course is quite helpful for me to construct my writing. Seemingly it is hard to explain why we need to predict the coupling response of composite piezoelectric or magnetostrictive materials to a person without engineering and physics background. Then it occured to me that I first got involved in this research project