Student Profile

Hi, I am Angela Young and I have been doing BA majoring in Japanese at the University of Waikato. I was born in Korea and came to New Zealand for a new life. As an immigrant, I sometimes feel it has been very hard to adapt to the different culture of New Zealand as it is a totally different environment from Korea.

The language barrier has been the biggest issue to me, as I am not an English native speaker. Moreover, when I came back to New Zealand after spending one year in Japan, I panicked with speaking English even in everyday conversations. I wanted to be confident in speaking in English and learn more formal English. That's why I chose this paper, ESLA202 Academic Oral Discourse. In this course, I have learned how to prepare for presentations, techniques in active reading, writing summaries of texts, organization of material and more. This course has made me understand how to do successful presentations and how to analyze a variety of reading materials through effective reading. Also this course encourages me to be creative in my other university study.

As I mentioned above, my major is Japanese. It means I am studying a foreign language, so I hardly have had opportunities to do presentations in English. However, oral communication skills are needed and very important for other subjects and my club activities at university. Therefore, doing this course has benefited my studying. Furthermore, this course has given me a chance to think about my whole study regime at university and prepared me for more effective study skills. It has been a huge benefit to study this paper at Waikato University.

Also in this course, I have had the chance to participate in group presentations. This was initially hard for to me, but so exciting. While I was preparing for group presentations, I have learned how to express my own opinions, how to cooperate with others and negotiation skills with my group members. It was great experiences for me to build my communication skills apart from presentation event in the class. I am sure those experiences will be very useful for my future job after I graduate.

After starting this course, I am getting more confident in speaking in front of people and I have developed my communication skills. It was a great choice to take this course. So I strongly recommend this course to students who want to develop communication skills.