M.+Reflection+Paper

This year has been an interesting year for me. For first time in my life I actually had an English classes, where we speak English for the whole class. I have definitely learnt the most this year, and not only like spelling and talking, bet even the hard stuff like “extreme vocabulary”, managing sentences and analyzing them. I can’t say that inLatviamy English classes were bad, they were just too easy and I think I have grown not only in language part, but also as a person, as an “Americanized” person. First of all, that was probably the whole real language difference that I was struggling about. When arriving inUSA, I can not say I was bad, just everything was different. Every single little thing : the way people talk, the way people act, that all should have gone together so simple, but it did not. I was different and I knew that, and that was my first step – to mix in the society and learn how to talk, write and do everything else like others do, and I think I did kind of good. Definitely, really important thing was vocabulary. Every day spent here I learnt and adapted to something new. Words, expressions, jokes, that all came so fast. Vocabulary was the thing that helped me to pull it all together and find the real words, like I do now. In first few months, when we were writing our first essays, finding the real words was a really hard task for me. I would sit there and think for an hour, with what should I even start, then, maybe write something a little bit, and then sit for one more hour pulling stuff from online for the best examples. Now it seems like peace of cake. Writing essays has been a huge part of my learning process in United States. Back in Latvia I always wrote my essays and other creative works only from my own viewpoint, but here I learnt that we can have lot of different kind ones – narrative, research, persuasive etc. I learnt not only how to better explain my opinion, analyze it, gather information from different school sites, but also prove it, and support it with beneficial facts. Also new thing for me was that we can not use “you”, using contractions, we almost always have to have an argument and thesis, but the most annoying thing was that use of rhetorical questions is not allowed. That was like my favorite part in whole writing tasks! Everybody has something that they are just NOT good in. My case is grammar. It has always been killing me. I can write a wonderful essay, but I will never get that hundred, because there will always be commas or other little stupid mistakes that always ruin my grade. Maybe it just takes time to adapt to English grammar, because inLatviawe used commas a lot and rules for them were totally different than in English, time will show. In Latvia you could always hear the place where you need to put the comma, make the run-on, not like in English, because when talking or writing in English there is not a real pause in the places where a comma should be. It makes things kind of complicated, but that is why I have Mrs.Szymczak. In my opinion this years masterpiece absolutely is my persuasive research essay. In this piece of “art” I had a clear argument – Electric cars against cars that run on gas. To find out which won, you will have to read and conclude. I put in a lot of effort and research in this essay and I am really proud of it. That is probably the longest piece of writing I ever wrote in my life. While writing this essay I learnt how to argue and switch opinion between things. I am pretty sure that being a foreigner in US has helped me with looking at things from different opinions and perspectives, because a lot of things that you can see here, you can not see inEuropeand other way around. I certainly believe that this opportunity and experience is going to help me in a lot of different ways of life. No matter what I do, or where I go, I will always different viewpoint. In addition about Wikispaces, I would like to say loud and clear, that this site is the best thing in school that ever happened to me! Of course except meeting my cute English teacher for the first time this year. Honestly, I could not even express in words how happy I felt when I found out that an online page like this exists, because I never had anything like this before and all my other years before, we almost always had to do everything in handwriting. So this was a change, a huge and flattering change. As time goes, I think, people will forget about handwriting as a thing anyway. Nobody wants to deal with stacks of papers all over the place, Wikispaces is much more easier, faster and reliable. Over all I feel much more confident about my English skills and knowledge than I was 9 months ago. In last couple of weeks some people have even told me that I am starting to loose my accent and have started to use words that they never even imagined to hear coming out of my mouth (in the good way). I was really happy about the “extreme vocabulary” part, but minute later, I started to realize that I do not even want to loose my accent, because even though I have learnt so much and improved my language skills in many ways, I have a feeling that always reminds me that, I am never going to be an American. I have to be an individual and keep that foreign sparkle that always motivates me to do better and more interesting.
 * Reflection paper [[file:reflection papeer.doc]]** Janis Plotnieks begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting 5/29/2011