Initial Reflection

Like other Thai students in the past, I had to learn many English classes since I was very young but, unfortunately, Thai teachers always focused on only vocabulary and grammar even if it was all of the things we should know in learning English. I had to remember many English words and remember grammar rules without practicing in real-life English usage; therefore, it would not be wrong to say that English education in Thai, at that time, was quite poor. However, I used to learn two academic writing classes. They both had their own advantages and disadvantages as follows.

The first academic writing class I used to learn was a required class for freshmen of Chulalongkorn University. This class was divided into many sections, my friends and I was ranked by an entrance examination score in English; so, we who had got higher scores would have to learn together. Each section was composed of thirty to forty students per a teacher. A teacher taught about basic components of academic essays such as an introduction, a body, and a conclusion and some other basic knowledge about writing. After each class, he gave a topic and assigned us to write an essay about that. After getting our assigned essays, he checked, gave scores and sent our works back in the next class without any reasons or comments on our works. As for me, it was not a good way to learn academic writing because there were too much students for only one teacher to pay his attention to all students, so he didn’t have enough time to carefully look on our works and give some comments to improve our works. After this class ended, I didn’t improve my English writing at all. The only one advantage of this course was being a free course.

The other academic writing class I used to take was a writing class for TOEFL examination. In my opinion, it helped me improve my English writing skill so much because of several benefits. To begin with, we all had to take pretest before class began and tutors would rank us into the most proper level for each of us. This made me have a chance to learn in my most proper level. Learning in this course was very different from the first one. I learnt many things about academic writing and learnt even how to write interesting essays in details. Moreover, although teachers were Thai, persons who checked our works were native English teachers; therefore, they could give a number of good comments on each of my works to urge me to improve my English writing skill. I could tell everyone that this course was a key factor contributing to my 5.0 TOEFL essay writing and total scores of 600 in TOEFL examination.

About EFL110, I expect to acquire more knowledge than I used to get from the past. I want to have more skills in writing so that I can write interesting and reliable essays and researches, especially in the field of Science. Moreover, I desire to practice my English skills in other aspects such as reading, listening, and speaking as well.