11/22/2020 Biweekly Journal

[Jiwon Kang]

Last week, Jenna and I met and went over my reading comprehension section together that I did for homework. There were only 3 mistakes that I made in the whole section which I was very happy about. Jenna and I decided to start practicing for the writing section of the COM2 exam. We started off by going over some of the prompts that she gave me the other lesson a couple of weeks ago. Jenna and I looked over each prompt specifically and created a plan of action for how I should answer this question. First, I would read and understand the prompt fully. If I didn’t know a certain word, I would use context clues to fully understand the prompt and prepare for what I should write about. The next step in answering the writing prompt is to brainstorm 3 to 4 ideas pertaining to the prompt. For example, if the prompt asked what I did over the last summer, I would come up with three to four activities I did during the past summer and write down the Korean translation for each activity. If I didn’t know the word in Korean, I would simply change and find a new activity to talk about in the writing response paragraph. Next, Jenna taught me how I should start for most of the prompts. The first sentence should always or most of the time start with an introduction or a greeting. I would write “hello” in formal Korean or I would rephrase the question before I stated my answer. For example, I would start the writing response paragraph with: “Hello, some of the things I did in the past summer were…” This was a great idea because most of the times I can copy the prompt word for word in order to restate and answer the question briefly. Jenna then taught me what I should talk about next: expand upon each of the things I came up with before. So, I would write one sentence about going to the beach, one sentence about playing basketball with my friends, etc. Doing these steps and following Jenna’s writing response plan, I would be able to come up with around 5-7 sentences in less than 10 minutes. Near the end of the class, I took around 15 to 20 minutes and answered a writing prompt and Jenna helped me as I started writing sentences. She did a great job not telling me what I spelled wrong right away. She asked me if I think I spelled any of the words wrong or not and I had to figure out if any of my spelling was wrong. This was a great way to self-check my writing without her directly telling me what I spelled wrong. I hope to continue practicing in a similar fashion for the COM2 writing portion. For homework week, Jenna told me to do three more prompts and time myself. The prompts were, “write a letter to your parents about your college experience,” “what is a typical day for you in college?” and “what do you like to do when you are bored?” I was able to finish all three prompts by the last session this past week. Jenna and I went over each response paragraph and corrected for spelling, spacing, and grammar. We saw a huge improvement in spelling errors as Jenna emphasized the mistakes I commonly made in previous lessons. We decided that I was ready for the COM2 exam sometime around next week and I am excited to finally reach the long-term goal I have been working on for the past couple of semesters.