Time flies, week13 is over and we are going prepare our finals! Blogging and reading others' blog posts with the same topic make me so obsessed on it and finally it comes to my final post for this English learning journey. It is so happy that I attended ES2007 class and met a humorous tutor and many energetic classmates, except for the fun stories heard from Brad, I did learn many things related to communications skills.
First thing I learned was active listening skills, as Joel mentioned in his post, we learned it because it is the basis of communication, how to react, how to show you are paying attention is essential. After that, we practiced our listening skills and other speaking skills in learning how to communicate inter-culturally and how to solve interpersonal conflicts, by doing the role playings and group discussions, we had the foundations of communication for us to move on. I enjoyed the class not only I learned how to listen and speak, but also got familiar with other useful skills for future working place, included business letter and email writing skills, interviewing and presenting skills, how to prepare resume and how to write proposal. During the peer teaching, mock interview, mock OP, final OP, I can feel that I was pushed in front of people, I need to improve and I realize that I am improving, by trying myself, by learning from my tutor and classmates, you guys are brilliant and drove me to pay more effort on it.
The most thing I learned and most part I have improved is the presentation skills. I was thinking presentation more depends on personal characters and language skills, however, during the class I also noticed that presentation is comprised with verbal and nonverbal skills, as well as slides making skills. I did not do well in my peer teaching, too crowded slides and non well preparation which made me to refer the screen too often, forgot that contact with your audiences was also important, memorizing slides content also made me just "presenting" but not natural. I noticed that and did some changes to my final OP, I made my slides simple so audiences can more focus on me, I fully understood what I was going to say so I would not need to memorize and use tip sheets. I also paid more attention to my nonverbal part, appropriate gestures and movements, more eyes contacts, made it more like from your heart instead of only from your mind. The result seemed better and thank you all for giving me positive reflection and useful feedbacks.
In a nutshell, the experience in ES2007 class is fresh and comfortable, skills I learned in the class, communication with my teammates during the class and through the internet, all of these are shaping me to be a good communicator not only in work places but also in my daily lives for lifelong period.
