Photos used with permissions from creative commons. “open book” by sarah_browning.

In this 2011-2012 academic year, I personally think I acquired a lot of skills from English, in various fields, such as making a vignette, a magazine article, and even writing a detailed character essay about Colin, from “Two Weeks with the Queen”. From these tasks, I would like to show four major things I have acquired effectively in reading, writing, and speaking.

The first skill I have effectively obtained, mainly from the text “The House on Mango Street” was recognizing the use of it, and using figurative languages in different parts of the story, and when writing my vignette about my friend. We have been reading the “The House on Mango Street”, full of short vignettes over a couple of weeks, paying attention to how the author Sandra Cisneros used figurative languages such as simile, metaphor, personification, and alliteration. We then had a task to create our own vignette (topic was anything). I carefully used these figurative languages in my vignette so that everyone wouldn’t realize my techniques, and naturally be interested in reading my vignette. Especially, I think I quite effectually used alliteration (making the first letters of the phrases the same) in my vignette very well, since it was my first attempt to add this technique into my writing. However, if I could redo this grade again, I would definitely improve my skills of using the figurative languages so that I would make these techniques unremarkable in my writing more so that I would get more higher grades at Criterion C; Style and Language Mechanics.

The second skill I have well acquired in this academic year was using different sentence structures, in its appropriate style. Some of the examples are a magazine article, a descriptive writing, a character essay, and a story/vignette with present tenses. When I was writing one of these examples, I was being careful checking if the style was appropriate to the writing. For instance, I have used a lot of figurative languages when writing a creative story, but not using it when writing an essay. I believe that I have become more cautious applying different sentence structures into different style of writing appropriately.

The last thing, not a skill, I once again noticed, was how Apartheid and Racism was a consequential issue in Africa from watching the movie “The Power of One”. The movie was about a boy who is English, who wanted to have no racism and respect people who have different races. The English and the Germans disliked each other after the World War II. Although, this movie demonstrated how the English plus the Germans treated the black people as their slaves, and didn’t even respect them. After I watched this movie, I thought how the black people were very sorrowful in the past, and good that there are no issues related to Apartheid in the present.

Overall, I have realized and acquired many skills/things, but also really enjoyed participating with our class and Mrs.Clifford, our English teacher in this academic year. We also studied from texts “Two Weeks with the Queen” and “Journey to Jo’Burg”. From these texts, we studied about homosexuality, relationships, growing up, Nelson Mandela, and places such as Johannesburg in South Africa and Mango Street in Mexico.

I would like to say thank you in this blog post, to my class, and especially to Mrs.Clifford who was our English teacher, who helped me a lot in my vocabulary, and also expanding my english skills.