Reflective Journal蔡逸清This term, I had Academic Writing as my last English course during my four years college study life. I reviewed what I had learnt and noted in the whole term and now I am trying my best to pen down my reflective journal about the course. Actually, at the beginning, I was hesitated to take this course concerning writing. Afterwards, I found it useful and not so difficult as my imagination therefore I made up my mind to learn it. I viewed it as a challenge to myself.During the course study, not only did I acquire the knowledge about academic writing, my horizon was also broadened for being exposed to some specific situations. This reflective journal contains my reactions and feelings, including both bad and good aspects of the experience, as well as the conclusion from these experiences. In the end, I am going to come up with my personal action plans such as how to put what I have learnt into practice and what I will do differently in this type of situation next time.Looking back to the whole term, my deepest impressions of this course is informative. Terminologies like genre, cohesion, coherence, paraphrase that were introduced to me were unacquainted, uncommon and difficult to remember so when the teacher was reviewing what had been taught last week I always felt so unfamiliar and I had to turn over my notes. Although this course focused mainly on theory, it also created a platform for us to practice writing and speaking. I consider it is very important for students to speak out bravely rather than placing stress just upon examinations because English is a language used to communicate with others and express one’s thoughts. So another feeling about the course is useful, pushing me to make a presentation and teaching me a lot of terminologies and rules about academic writing, which I might employ when I write essays in the future. To sum up, even if it’s not so interesting, I still feel it is a worthwhile course to study.The experience of learning academic writing benefits me a lot. First of all, it makes me understand clearly some key points I need to pay attention to when writing an article. For example, achieving grammatical and lexical cohesion, as well as achieving coherence is crucial for each essay. It helps combining every part of the essay together and finally shaping the essay as a consistent entirety. Then, the second part of this course teaches us how to make a presentation successfully, giving me a chance to prepare, practice and finally present it before the whole class. When designing the PPT of my presentation, I learnt to take the reaction of audience into consideration, so color and size of the words were both selected carefully to make audience see them more clearly. Besides, I also developed the good habit of reflecting regularly owning to the course. Finally, my carefulness was trained in class and now it has been improved a lot. I still remember the class of ‘documenting your sources’ clearly. That day, our group was the last one to write down the correct order of the bibliography. It seemed as an easy work to finish but the truth is that it really tested my carefulness.Every coin has two sides, and the course is of no exception. Academic writing, just shown like its name, lays stress on contents of academy, far away our daily life. As a result, this course was not so interesting and attractive. Also, the knowledge I acquired in class can hardly be used in other situations. It is limited to the specific situation like writing academic papers. On the other hand, although the course gave us many chances to speak, the students didn’t cherish them. The atmosphere of the class was not lively but a little depressing, so I was worried about speaking in front of others. But now I think the presentation was well-done by me since I had practiced a lot to overcome the fear.In conclusion, from these experiences I learnt what should be contained in an abstract and how to make a presentation in a formal situation. In addition, my habits also got shaped to some extent.As a student, the consciousness of reflecting regularly is of great importance. Reflecting can act as a review of the knowledge. Furthermore, it helps me to find the ways of study truly suitable for me. During reflection, I realized that I had not prepared the presentation very well and had stared on the computer for too much time, ignoring the audiences’ feelings. So for me, it is necessary to prepare fully, practice more and be confident when making a presentation.When it comes to my personal action plans, firstly, I think I should study hard on my major to create chances to write English essays for myself. Until now, I have just written short essays without references and abstract. Therefore, I need to work hard and then I can put what I learnt about academic writing into practice. Before I am capable of writing academic English articles, I plan to employ the knowledge on my Chinese writing, paying attention to the structure, abstract, cohesion, coherence and references.As for the speaking part, I believe practicing more is pretty meaningful to me. To be honest, I am one-hundred percent confident of my English. So every time before I raised hand to answer the question teacher put forward, I always bring a brainstorm to answer the question. When making a presentation, I hardly felt nervous and can easily chill it out. For this reason, I must be very familiar with what I am going to say next time and look at the audiences rather than staring at the computer screen. To make myself calm down and confident, I should also prepare some little cards with key words. Next time, I believe I can do better to make a presentation in both English and Chinese.。