Wednesday 30 November 2016

Critical Reflection on Developing Communication Skills (Updated)

The effective communication module has provided me a great opportunity to further develop my oral communication and writing skills.  Our tutor, Brad, has made this module an interesting and interactive one, allowing us to learn through blogging and Q&A sessions.

Our assignments are mostly in the form of blog posts, and each post must be reviewed and amended with reference to the comments given by Brad and my peers. This allows me to constantly learn from my mistakes and improve with every draft written. Taking the summary and reader response assignment as an example, the first 2 drafts were merely a summary with brief responses, whereas the final draft included a more comprehensive research. Every draft requires much more effort and from this, I managed to learn how to write an appropriate thesis statement and reader’s response.

This module also gave me an opportunity to develop my oral communication skills. Engineering courses seem to have relatively little modules that require oral presentation, therefore I am glad to have a chance to develop and improve my oral skills.

According to the comments I received, fluency is one of my strengths and I do not have any persistent language problems. However, the most common mistakes I made are verbose and run on sentences. I aim to improve on these problems and refrain from having long and unnecessary sentences in my future reports.

As this module is coming to an end, I would like to take this chance to thank Brad and my fellow classmates for this enjoyable learning journey. I look forward to putting these skills to use in the near future. 



_________________________________________


Commented on:
- Chris’s Analytical Reflection on 06 December 2016
- AlcinaAnalytical Reflection on 06 December 2016
- MasyitaAnalytical Reflection on 06 December 2016
- Kevin’s Communication Skills Reflection on 10 December 2016
- Frankie’s Critical Reflection on 10 December 2016
- Ming Kang’s Critical Reflection on 10 December 2016


10 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks very much, Derrick, for this heart-felt and detailed reflection. I’m glad you could find so many positives in our module. It’s also interesting that you point out the process based writing (in the blogging) as being especially useful. It’s also heartening for me to know that you have appreciated the interactive nature of the module. That’s the essence of authentic communication, after all.

    I really appreciate all your fine effort this term, Derrick. Best of luck in your future endeavors!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Brad,

      Thank you for taking your time to read my blog post. The process based writing is really useful as I tend to have a hard time processing my thoughts. This method allows me to draft out an initial draft and continue editing and improving from there.

      Thank you once again for your guidance!

      Delete
  3. Hey Derrick,

    This is a very brief and concise reflection with a brief explanation on how every part of this module has helped you to improve your communication skills.
    Yes its true the summary and reader response was really time consuming, but it will definitely help you when writing a train fault problem in the future when working under LTA. :))

    Hope you enjoy your holidays before it ends.....!1

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Abiali,

      Thank you for taking your time to read my blog post. I agree that the summary and reader response will definitely be useful to me in the future. Enjoy your holidays too!

      Delete
  4. hi Derrick
    I am glad that you have learned a lot from this module. It has been a great journey learning with you, and i am sure you have improved a lot on your oral skills over the course of this module. Keep up the good work!

    Chris

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Chris,

      Thank you for taking your time to read my blog post. It has also been a great learning journey with you. You sure have improved too! Let's continue working hard together!

      Delete
  5. It is nice to see that we have all made improvements to our communications skills through this module. I agree totally with you that the assignments, though tedious at times, were benefitial to our learning and mastering of English. I hope that we can take this as a good foundation and start point and continue progressing from here on in our communication and skills journey.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kevin,

      Thank you for taking your time to read my blog post. I am glad that we all had improvement in our communication skills. This module has indeed helped to build our foundation for the rest of our reports and presentations in SIT. I hope we will continue improving from here!

      Delete