Romanticians

Reflection on Graded Assignments

ASSIGNMENT 1

            To complete our first assignment related to computer assisted language learning (CALL), we had worked on a research article entitled Investigating the Perceptions of UKM Undergraduates towards an English for Science and Technology Online Course. We find that the research indirectly reflects more or less our own perceptions as well towards the use of computer in language learning, what more in this particular class. Online learning through the Internet apparently transforms the nature of formal education. In the context of language education, online learning allows learners like us to access and learn a second or a foreign language far beyond the classrooms in a more convenient and flexible way. As the findings of this study suggest, we perceive this course as contributing highly towards our improvements in reading skills and strategies, contributing moderately in terms of autonomy as some of us do not desire full autonomy in fact still need a preference for a combination of both face-to-face and online modes of learning and increasing our motivation in learning process.

            The advent of computer and Internet undeniably contributes a lot on autonomous learning and it is not only limited to language learning and teaching but other aspects as well. This is so because whenever we find difficulties especially on completing our assignments and constructing blog, we will always try to find some answers and guidelines available on Internet. It is really satisfying to achieve something through this way of self-discovery learning.

ASSIGNMENT 2

            This assignment has opened our eyes on the endless possible corpus that can be used in doing an analysis. We have chosen a Yahoo group called Dellirium as our corpus. This email group has contributed a lot to our analysis and understanding on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). At the same time, this assignment really has challenged our ability on linguistics, especially in Pragmatics. We focus our analysis on request and speech acts. Therefore, before we started completing the assignment, we have to study back on these two topics as to get a better understanding about them. These two aspects of linguistics can be made more interesting if we broaden our choices of corpus linguistics like blog, chat room and many more, adding to the corpus we already have.

            This assignment is the most challenging compared to other assignments in this course.  This is because the analysis for the corpus needs to be sorted into categories which are a bit hard for us to decide. But Hajar has found the right way to do it and prepare a relevance table for the analysis. We apply the same analysis strategy which was used in our previous Semantics class for this analysis. The result was satisfactory and we were very glad to have finally completed the assignment.

            We realize that we can improve our performance in completing the task and smoothly finishing the assignment if we started doing it earlier. By this way, it can avoid the time limit we have to endure in completing the assignment and we can have more time in planning for the methods of analysis. We also face some troubles in posting the assignment into the blog as it comes out not as what we have already prepared it. We have to edit the post several times and we learn many things about blog from this experience.

            Overall, this assignment has made our teamwork become stronger and has developed a better communication between group members.

ASSIGNMENT 3

            This assignment was assigned to us in a form of presentation. The focus of this assignment is on the corpus linguistics and our group has been given a topic on Concordancer. There are lots of thing we have learned from this assignment and we all agreed that this assignment is the most interesting and fun to do compare to other assignments. There are several reasons why we find this task to be the most joyous and exciting.

            Firstly, we were exposed to a new term which is concordancer. This new term has created excitement to us as it was our first time on hearing the term. We have to learn and understand it from scratch and discover much new information about it. As concordancer is text-analysis software, we were asked by Madam Rozina to demonstrate on how to use the software to the whole class. This extra task has given us a new skill which is on how to use a concodancer and lead us to explore AntConc concordancer. This new skill has opened our eyes on how analysis can be made easily if we were to use this software in our previous assignment 2.

            Secondly, the result of our hard work in completing this presentation was hugely rewarded by Madam Rozina’s satisfaction with our performance during the class presentations. We found that a good work is a result of a good spirit in doing it combined with team work and mutual understanding between group members.

            Overall, this assignment has exposed us to useful software and skills which we found will benefit us so much in the future.