Self-assessment for Freshman Composition
I am an African girl, English is not my first language and to many other people back home, it is not even the second. It is true that Rwanda, my home country uses English as the primary language in the education system, but outside class it is rarely spoken. This weakens our speaking skills though the writing is pretty good. Some schools like mine try to use the English policy that restricts the use of any other language other than English, but it can not erase the fact that even most of the teachers who have a French background are not fluent in English. So, the students are likely to adopt the broken English especially when it comes to pronunciations.
The transition from a society where I joke, argue, or reason in Kinyarwanda to a new place where I have to tell stories and reason in English, was a challenge because my emotional expression lies in my mother tongue. It is even hard to hold a long conversation with a friend in English without including some exclamation words like “egoko” or filler words like “nyine” though I try not to.
From the first time I joined the Freshman Composition class, I felt ready to meet the course’s expectations and be on the same page with other students. Not until we had our first peer reviews when I had to discuss with my peer about her paper and I would lose words to clearly explain my feedback on her points. I took a long time to hit the point and I also realized that it was becoming a threat to my group. I got to know how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users. As time went on, I felt different with my clarity of words and not anxious to share my ideas like before. Thanks to my country Rwanda that fosters English speaking in schools because it was not the fact that I do not know the vocabulary but did not have confidence in the pronunciation of the words.
In peer reviews which were my favorite part of the class, I developed strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing as I emphasized this point in most of my learning outcomes. Whenever I had the opportunity to read my peer’s essays, I tried to analyze how they organized their points and their choice of words which enriched my vocabulary. Another interesting thing about peer reviews is that I got encouraged to read different materials all over the internet to be informed since my peers always had stories about what is going on or happened in the US and I mostly got lost. I started reading The New York Times and other articles to enlighten my knowledge of the status quo.
Additionally, during the first major assignment where I had to share my background influence on language use, I wrote a language literature narrative that talked about how oppressed I was with feedback request on my composition. When I was drafting this story of poetry nights with my village elders, I had a lot of details to give but I struggled arranging the points on the paper. But by following the Professor’s say about steps of writing, I managed to develop clarity of words, choice of words, and description of event in a way that my intended audience will easily understand the message as intended. I used a PowerPoint presentation to show some of the places that marked my story with language because I understood the importance of print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.
Furthermore, when I was preparing the second major assignment that was a rhetorical analysis of the speech “I have a dream”, I got a challenge with interpreting statements that were used in the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I had to always search for meanings all over the internet and most of the historical facts such as “The Emancipation Declaration” that backed up his arguments were not familiar, so I had to do more research on them. However, this enriched my researching skills throughout my classes that needed thorough research like the informative and persuasive speech in the speech class. In this assignment, I also managed to explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
To continue, talking about the third major assignment, I wrote a researched essay that involved mechanisms through which colonization led to dilution of mother languages. This is where I had to strictly exercise my researching skills so that I create a research paper that is not just about my logical appeal but backed up with credible facts from various research tools such as scholarly articles. I recognized and practiced key rhetorical terms and strategies when writing the description of the issue because the idea was inspired by my personal experience in Rwanda, so I had to draw an image of how significant the issue is and how urgent it is to be tackled on. I composed texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation to structure the paper and used MLA citation style by the help of OWL Purdue to present my works cited because it is the most used for literature papers.
All in all, as a student in Engineering, majoring in Computer Science, I can confirm that I have achieved the course objectives and was educated on how important it is to present a full package of composition with credibility and easy for everyone to understand.
