Research Reflection

It has been eighteen years since I graduated from college in South Korea. I came back to school again, but surprisingly, this time in the United States. Going back to school is very exciting and also extremely frightening at the same time because English is a second language to me. I have lived in America for two years, but I am still not confident in English. This English class was a big challenge for me. Basically, my goal was to write and understand the language better. I took ESL classes before at FRCC. It was a good program, but I felt something was missing. There was a limit to learning English for beginners. I wanted to go further. I wanted to evaluate myself while taking this class. Although writing in English gave me tremendous stress, I have learned a lot. My stress about writing in English has been alleviated a little bit, and I seem to have a better sense of how to write in English.

Writing the research paper was stressful and a big challenge. It required a lot of time and work to finish. I wanted to write about my country, South Korea. The research I did in this class focused on what caused high suicide rates in Korea. Since I chose a topic about the suicide rate in Korea, I had to go through many news articles to find relevant materials for my research. I was very surprised that teenagers’ suicide rate, caused by poor academic performance, is very high. Although I had already experienced the Korean education system, the competition seems to have become more serious. If I did not research this topic, I would not have understood why so many Korean students commit suicide. The most striking realization I came to was that Korean society has many big problems. For example, the competitive educational environment, lack of jobs, and lack of welfare systems are all becoming more serious problems than I thought. I had a lot of difficulties when I prepared the research paper. At first, I just wasted a lot of time reading articles because I did not know how to start a research paper and what kind of sources I should cite to support my opinion. I spent a whole day and only wrote just a few sentences, which was so frustrating. However, I was able to select good information over time. Absolutely, it was very important to take time to prepare a research paper.  After choosing sources, it was difficult to paraphrase them in my own words because I do not have a rich English vocabulary. Sometimes I used the wrong words. One thing I did well in my paper was to organize it by age of suicide victims so that readers could better understand what happened to teenagers, young adults, and elderly people.

My professor, Jennifer Zukowski, pointed out that my grammar is awkward. I think this is because I think in Korean first and then translate to English, so my grammar has a Korean style. My tutor has helped me a lot to fix incorrect grammar. I need to increase my vocabulary and practice writing in English directly without first thinking in Korean. I know that I still have a lot of improvements to make, and I will try harder to write a good paper. This English class was good preparation for writing more essays. While I was preparing this research paper, my fear of English disappeared a little, and I gained some confidence. Writing a research paper was hard, but it was worth it. I enjoyed this class and I have improved my writing skills, which will help me with my writing in the future.

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