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Reflective Development

Carla Allende 1

Reflective essay on development

The purpose of this essay is to reflect on my own work and progress

during a term from August to November 2012 writing three papers in order to

comply with the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) requirements to pass a

university course.

The three papers presented in this portfolio were written following

the same process of drafting and editing. First, I wrote and edited wiki entries

related to a certain topic in the paper together with a group of two other peers. Then,

I prepared a first draft and sent it to my tutors who made comments and corrections.

The drafts had to follow specific criteria including rubrics and document naming;

this had to do with demands related to the course itself. However, in terms of

strictly academic demands, the papers acquired entity as such only when I corrected

them and published them in the blog.

As regards the wiki writings stage, the main difficulty I encountered

was to agree on a writing schedule which was convenient for all the three members

of the group wiki. On the whole, I benefited more when we had to correct peers

papers because I could see my own mistakes reflected on my peers paper and this

made the editing step of my own paper flow faster. Wiki writing shared some

characteristics with writing from a peripheral standpoint for a certain discourse

community; according to Swales (1990) shares goals, background literature,

methods, and collective genre are characteristics of discourse communities.

The first draft always found me short of time and this is a pity

because paper writing is highly time consuming and demands a long process of self-

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Reflective Development

Carla Allende 2

correction, which would have been inexistent had I worked on my own. At the same

time, the strict timing facilitated me to learn to work effectively to meet deadlines.

Certainly, tutors comments highly furthered my writing in this stage. Furthermore,

consulting and revising American Psychological Association (APA) style cannons

proved to be a whole challenge, which in due term and only in the end, rendered

itself successful.

Although I first found the writing of my own papers unnecessary in

terms of academic value, I gradually started to develop a twofold attitude towards

my own writing: first, a sense of value and then a sense of belonging. Being

acquitted with appropriate citation and writing cannons like APA style has raised

my aspiration to participate more actively as scholar in the Teaching English as a

Foreign Language (TEFL) field, pertinent for a competent English teacher.

All in all, the continuing enlargement of the audience for which I was

writing for has facilitated my learning process. Moreover, my own evaluation and

appraisal of my own papers changed; actually, it altered all the time, in each paper,

during the academic writing course. Basically, the challenge of each paper was

always correctly balanced to keep writers interest high. Even though I still do not

evaluate my papers as sources of new knowledge, I now have developed the urge

for my writing to become as explorative and academic as possible for an ever

broader audience.

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