Self Reflection on the Teaching of Writing Skills Course

            For the Teaching of Writing Skills subject, we have Professor Dr. Jayakaran Mukundan or we refer to him as Prof Jaya, as our lecturer. Knowing him as a funny and sporting lecturer, I am so glad that he will be teaching us. In his class, I have gained a lot of new knowledge on writing skills. I have learned things such as approaches in teaching writing to students, creative writing such as poems and also short stories.

            The very first thing that I learned was on process writing and product writing. Those two are the most common approaches that teachers use to teach writing. I know those two topics are very important because we learned it for several weeks, and they came out in our first test. Every week, Prof Jaya will repeat the same thing until all of us become immune with both process and product writing. Not only we learned the characteristics, we also applied the approaches through our writing. We did write an essay by going through the process approach. It was a horror story which Prof Jaya gave us the introduction and we have to continue the storyline according to our creativity. For the task, we were to discuss in group, and then wrote down the story and hand it to Prof Jaya. I really like doing discussion in group for a lot of new and creative ideas can be created from each and every one of us. This way, our story will be more interesting.

            After the essay writing, Prof Jaya informed us that there will be a writing conference between us and the Master/PhD students – Dr. Vahed, Ali and Peisha. Each of us was given one mentor and I got Peisha. I was very excited for I know her personally. She asked me a couple of questions regarding writing and commented on my essay. She really helped me in improving to write better product in the future. She gave me some useful tips to come out with interesting stories such as inject more feeling, add in more detail and so on. I thanked Prof Jaya for having this session because it really helped me a lot in my writing.

            Another thing that I learned is the creative writing, which is poem. To be frank, I am not a big fan of poems. I dislike how I do not able to interpret the underline meaning of them. But in this class, it was the other way around. We did listen to some examples of the poems, but the highlight is we wrote them by ourselves. So, it was not a problem for me to interpret them since I wrote them by myself. I also get to learned many forms of poems such as acrostic, cinquain, haiku, sense, hello..goodbye, I’m old enough….I’m young enough, diamante, I wish and free poem. There are so many types of poems that we can produce. I will certainly to teach my students all those kind of poems so that they will fall in love with poems like I do now.

Apart from that, Prof Jaya taught us that our natural surrounding can be our main source of inspiration in writing poem. There was a time when he asked us to go near the lake at DKFPP to write haiku. Another time, he asked us to use fruits as our poem subject. There was one day; it was raining during our class. So, Prof Jaya asked us to write a free poem on the gloominess of the day. I was so impressed on how the nature alone can contribute to my collection of poems. Although my poems are not as good as the famous poets’ poems, but I am really proud of each and every one of them.

Besides that, we also learned about short stories. We get to know about maturity in writing – how we think when we are doing our essay, how to give freedom to students to produce an essay beyond the syllabus and et cetera. Same as the horror story that we did earlier, we were given the introduction only and we have to come out with our own story. But, this time around, it is an individual task.

The other thing that I learned from this class is getting to know students problems in writing. Prof. Jaya sometimes mentioned about it orally in class. But last week, we knew it from a movie viewing. It is about a student who suffered from dyslexia. Not only we can release our tension by watching it, but, we get to learn the techniques to help those kinds of students. It is a very useful input for us as future teachers. And next week, we are about to watch another movie called “The Dead Poet Society”. We already watched some of the clips of the movie and it was very interesting! I’m hoping to become that type of excellent teacher one day.

I enjoyed playing games in this class, which can also be used as a part of the lesson. The other day, we played a game where we wrote a question on a paper, fold it and pass to the next person. Then, without looking at the question that we got, we have to write down the answer to our own question. Of course there were some answers that are way out of the line, but all answers are somehow vice versa and totally got the questions! I really like the game and I secretly hope that Prof. Jaya will introduce more fun games in the class.

Last but not least, it was Prof. Jaya who brought us to the International Conference on English Language Teaching (ICELT) which was held at Equatorial Hotel, Melaka. We went there for free! There, we met a lot of excellent people such as. We learned about drawing, approaches in teaching poems through singing and sounds, story-telling techniques and many more. We really enjoyed every sessions that we went for the input will give very big helps to us in the future. We can apply what we learned there in school later on.

I have gained a lot in this class. Sadly, this will be the final semester that we get to learn with Prof. Jaya. I will surely miss this class, the jokes, the conference and everything related to writing. Thank you so much Prof. Jaya for all the things you have taught us!