As a person whose first language isn’t English and it’s continually being replaced with Spanish daily, learning English hasn’t been so easy for me. Knowing big words, knowing how to formulate sentences, correcting grammar errors and praying to understand others and to others understand me because of my accent is my daily battler. This semester I have noticed that I got and still getting better everyday. This semester I’ve grown a lot as a writer. I’ve expanded my vocabulary, I grew my confidence talking to others, and also grew my capacity to complete long/dicult assignments.

          I normally have many grammatical errors, that’s one of the things that keeps me up at night but recently, very recently I feel that my writing has generally improved. Now I know so many big words I didn’t even know about 4 months ago or that I knew about but never knew what they meant and how I could use them. Being part of this class and college in general basically pushed me to expand my vocabulary. It’s something they demand and when I say ‘Them’ I’m not talking about a group of people in expecific, when I say ‘Them’ I’m referring to the journal in college, your whole educational word literally changes.

         When I was in High school I personally never felt that the professor cared too much about the grammar. As long as I completed the work everything was fine and that wasn’t something that settled right with me. I wanted to know how my progress learning English was going, I wanted to know from anybody whose English was perfect or close to perfect how my English was going and I also wanted help.

         I remember my first assignment in college for English 110 Profesor Orwing pointed out that my grammar needed more improvement and she was totally right. The assignment was ‘WLLN (Final draft)’ I unfortunately don’t have the feedback she gave me because I started to edit the assignment on the same document she shared with me and I deleted it when I finished editing but it was a four-pages essay explaining about an impactful moment in my journey learning English, giving as much details as possible and explaining how we feel about that moment and did it impact my life.

 

(Evidence from my WLLN.)

I’m lucky enough to have a teacher who understands that her students are not perfect and we all have a dierent background and most of us have struggles with English. She has always been helpful, starting with giving us the opportunity to express ourselves about our background and our history with English with the WLLN and SLLN assignments. Providing us with sources to help us for example during the first Phase of the course she gave us a hand-out that contains dierent verbs we can freely use in our assignments, I am still using that chart and currently we are getting into the fourth and last phase.

(A preview of the chart, it’s longer)

In the past 3 weeks I was assigned with two essays, The research paper and Politics and big money and while I was typing my essays I decided to use dierent words than what I commonly would use. I started to look for dierent words that means the same thing to the word I wanted to use at the beginning and that made me realized how many words I already knew they existed and knew they meaning but my brain never came up with them when I was typing and from there I decided to memorize more words and right now I’ve noticed myself, I’m and did progress, I’m and did expand my vocabulary, I’m and did fix my grammar and I’m very proud of myself and thankful for having an amazing English professor.