Saba Khatchapuridze
ENGL 21003
Major Assignment #4
Prof. Hunter
Semester Narrative
English language has never been strong component of my linguistic skills, being born and raised in Eastern Europe speaking two languages, Georgian and Russian, I was never taught English. When I attended school back in my country, we did have English lessons, but we barely learnt anything, just because that the education system back then valued Russian language more because of hostilities between Russia and Georgia. I was always keen on watching new movies and tv-shows, but since they were not accessible in any of the languages besides English I was highly motivated to learn the basics of language on my own, when I was 8 I remember turning on this one Nickelodeon show called House of Anubis with English subtitles on and binging the whole show in a week or two, I have to say that doing this on numerous movies and tv-shows helped me a lot in learning basic principles of the language. This went on for years, to be more exact this went on for 10 years, until the day when I arrived in the United States. I was lucky enough to be put in senior class of my high school and graduated semester after I arrived in the U.S, needless to say handling the language barrier was hard for me since I had virtually no practice in speaking English. After High School I had to quickly take SAT and enroll college, my first semester of college was very beneficial for me, I learnt a lot and Freshman Composition class taught me a lot about more complex concepts of the language. Since I have decided to major in Psychology, I was required to take ENGL 21003 with Prof. Hunter who tried his best during chaotic pandemic time to make the class as easy as he could, I want to use this opportunity to thank him for his hard-work and dedication, it was a pleasure meeting him and my peers in this class. The assignments that Prof. Hunter gave us included all the required instructions which made very clear what we as students and writers were required to do. For example my first major assignment was Rhetorical Analysis which required me to conduct analysis about controversial scientific topic, find reliable sources and use scholarly articles and piece of information such as graphics or visuals to conduct the paper for audience which hypothetically was uneducated about the topic. This assignment taught me how to look up reliable academic sources and implement them in my research, It also taught me that run-on sentences are not really a great thing to include in academic research paper. Feedback that the Professor gave me was highly helpful for upcoming assignments that had the same concept, for example Major Assignment #2 required me to create research inquiry based paper (similar to first one with deeper insight), with proper MLA citations and at least 5 reliable academic sources that would include information for two new audiences. In my case, I wrote my paper about COVID-19 pandemic and how it affected student’s mental health, my two new audiences were college students themselves and college officials looking for ways to handle the crisis well. My paper included some grammatical mistakes, I feel like I learned a lot more about scientific part of essay-writing (just the way it should be in this class) than the grammatical part of writing a paper, I feel like that I really need to put in more work to improve grammar part of my work, top-notch work in this aspect makes essay easier for readers to read and more aesthetic since sentences flow smoother. This paper also taught me that as the audience changes the paper itself changes completely too, since writer has to adjust needs and requirements of the audience properly, for more qualified audience language becomes more formal, for younger audience paper becomes more visual which brings me to Major Assignment #3 that required me and my group to create children’s book based on the research all of us concluded in previous assignment. Such assignments that involve groups taught me a lot about group-work, luckily enough my groupmates were very responsive, active and understanding when it came to dividing our works and submitting the work in timely manner, just like in other scenarios, during this assignment all of us divided our works and handed in the book in the form of PowerPoint presentation before the deadline. This assignment taught me to modify my academic research and work in a way that will become very easy to read, understand and comprehend for audience that has no knowledge of scientific field. Personal Reflection part of the assignment gave me a lot to think about, I had to rate myself and my peers, it taught me to be objective, honest and respectful towards everyone involved, just like discussion boards on which we had to reply our comments on our peer’s posts. Sychronous discussions and co-leading meetings taught me to listen more to what others have to say and discuss the topic in live regime, saying thoughts from the top of my head without really doing much of a research. Final assignment which is semester narrative made me think a lot about this semester and what I learnt, it also showed me parts that I have to improve on, but overall I feel like I’m better student, writer and speaker of Englush language than I was before the semester started. This class taught me about CUNY Academic Commons which is a showcase for student’s academic work, It’s a really cool thing after you get a hand of it, I learned how to design the website to make it look like a blog. https://sabakeng.commons.gc.cuny.edu this link will lead to my academic portfolio that will showcase my assignments and work that I have done throughout the semester. I am not really tech-savy when it comes to blogs and web-sites but I think I did my best to make it easy to navigate. In conclusion, once again thanks to my peers and Prof. Hunter for making this class as pleasant as it can be during the pandemic and I am looking forward to working with them more.
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