Reflection (14/5/12-18/5/12)

  We kicked off this week of English lessons by watching the research presentations made by the working groups in our classes. It was evident that most of the presentations were put in a lot of effort in order to help one another. I've learnt a lot while working on my presentation last week but this week, it's all about learning how to research quality academic materials for our research essays.

 As I'm researching on Malcolm X, this week have been an eye-opening week to proper researching method and materials which simply pulverises my dependency on wiki pages. Not that Wikipedia and Google aren't useful but I've learnt that there are websites such as Sirs(http://ars.sirs.com), Gale (http://www.gale.cengage.com/) and many more reliable and factual academic e-resources that are shared with us are indeed very helpful for this coursework. I've honestly never seen such websites until recently and find them as banks of useful resources for whatever learning subject I'm in.

 These useful e-resourses also becomes a habit for me now whenever I need quality information as it provides me a far more accurate database of research materials whenever I need them. I feel that this is a step in improving my academic performance as our essays now can no longer be simple pieces of writing that drive teachers up the wall and should instead be sophisticated, critically-analyzed pieces of writing with added research to support the essay.

 I also realise that our literature circles need to be spiced up in order to engage in a productive discussion. I enjoyed Pei Qin's method in her role as a vocabulary enricher of using online flashcards to record the the vocabulary words found in the chapters of Animal Farm and believe that we should go out of the box and gain ideas like Pei Qin to engage our group members during our literature circle sessions.