Critical Reflection on Learning in the Course
It’s been a long way since the start of this English module
and had been challenging as well as interesting to say the least. I remember
that at the very first day of lesson, I was nervous and afraid of coming to a class
where there will be new classmates, new lecturer and new classroom with no one
from my previous class. However, I am glad that I have stayed on and not
changed my class as I would not have been able to know such wonderful people
otherwise. My classmates were accepting of me, the lecturer was strict and yet
understanding and my project group members were always there to help when
needed.
In this post, I am going to share about whether I could meet
the objectives that I have set myself for at the start of this module. To
recap, the objectives were noticing other people’s non-verbal cues and the
ability to take lesser amount of time to choose my words carefully when I am
communicating to the target audience. These two objectives are hard to meet and
I sure had a hard time just trying to meet either one.
I am going to start with how far I have gone in noticing
other people’s non-verbal cues. I have made some progress in this area by
listening and looking at the other person’s cues through active listening and
non-verbal communication skills. By paying attention to what the other person
is saying, I could pick up the underlying message and from the outer display of
actions, I was able to pick up what they wish to say or what they would like to
do. However, as this requires a great deal of attention span and energy, I was
not able to keep it up for conversations that last too long. Although I may
have said this, I believe that I was able to achieve the goal of knowing how to
take note of people’s non-verbal cues. This can be proven in my project team
members that were hard to understand by the rest of my class. I have tried hard
to understand their train of thoughts and thus produced great results. I thank
them for this much improvement.
Next, on to the second objective. This objective is one that
I have a lot of trouble with. Reason being that if I were to think too much,
the topic of conversation would have shifted to the next topic or that it would
have progressed further away from where it was at. An example of this would be
when a topic was originally about where to have lunch with a group of friends;
but as I took my time to give an input, they might have already decided on the
place and cuisine to have. The result, I think that I have made little to none
improvement in this area. However, due to this being an important skill to
have, I will be continuing to do my best to improve myself during my stay as a
college student.
With this, I will have set a new goal to meet before I graduate
and begin my life as a contributing society member. And that would be to gain
the ability to lead a team well by communicating with different types of people
(by applying the leadership skills), resolving a conflict with another people
due to conflicting ideas or due to either party not being able to express their
thoughts well (by applying conflict management skills).
To end the post on a good note, I would like to thank
everyone from my class, my readers and my commentators. Thank you for the great
comments and support you have been giving me. I hope to be able to work with
you guys sometime soon.
