ESL 114 was a very interesting class with a wonderful teacher and pleasing students. It was a pleasure to be in this class both because of its good atmosphere and useful information. Attending this class was like a remedy against all those engineering classes that made me feel unwell or nauseous. Therefore, it was a very good idea to attend the class afternoon and recover from that bad condition. Without doubt I have to say that it was a very helpful class for me. During this semester I have learned many things like the correct use of the articles, construction of well-structured sentences, and finding appropriate information for the essay. And the right use of them has a crucial importance in writing a good essay.
The correct use of the articles is important because of the abundant use of them in an essay. The usage of articles was always a burden for me. Why English do have to use these articles? There are many other languages like Russian, Turkish, and Arabic that are perfect without using these articles. But still, I had to face it and learn how to use them both in my speech and in my essays. I have noticed that it is hard even for the Native Americans to explain the usage of a particular article. Since they use the articles intuitively since their birth they have never thought about this issue and probably never will, unless they are becoming an English teacher. But I wouldn’t say that it is impossible to learn the articles. Our teacher did her best to teach us the basic principles. Tutoring sessions with a teaching assistant was very helpful as well. And to say the truth, articles aren’t that bad at all. It is just a matter of time to get to know them well.
Well-structured sentences are very critical in writing a good essay. It is very important not to have fragments or run-on sentences while writing an essay. Because of the inappropriately constructed sentence a reader might not comprehend the right idea of the sentence. And I should say that I was little confused with the construction of sentences in the beginning. I had problems with fused sentences, also known as run-on sentences. This type of problem usually occurs when two or more independent sentences fused in one sentence without any punctuation marks. And I also had some problems with the usage of comma in separating dependent clauses. But after a while I was able to fully understand and use them in a grammatically correct way. That was not so hard as with the articles.
And the last, finding appropriate information for the essay is also very critical to support the ideas mentioned in an essay. It would be very hard to strengthen the points mentioned in the essay without good supporting details. These details can be summarized from the obtained information and used in a proper way whether to support or contradict the statement. I have begun browsing databases since the first day of the class and often used databases like Academic Search Premier, Lexis-Nexis Academic, etc. It was a little difficult to find proper information for the essay but after hours of research and help of the advisers I was finally able to handle it. One can find very interesting articles related to one’s topic and use them as a supporting example, fact, or statement.
To conclude, I really enjoyed the ESL 114 class. It was a really productive class. I have learned a lot of useful information. And this is the only class where the teacher cares about her students by entertaining sweet candies and tasty cookies to the students. I really did like this class. In this class the students should have felt themselves like being at home.