REFLECTION 1

Being English major requires a very sincere heart. We still remember when one of our lecturers asked us, “Why do you take English as your major? Is it because being English major sounds glamorous? Do you take it because you heard that getting employed is not a difficult thing for English major?” These questions make us ponder and reflect on what is the main intention of being here. “Are we sincere enough?” The other lecturer once said to us, “Make sure that you have an aim that one day, you will become a good Muslim writer who represents Islam truthfully.”

In order to become a good Muslim writer in the future, we must do our best in every single subject that we take for our degree. Even though some of us might hate linguistic subjects or literature subjects, we need to bear with them until the end. Looking at everything as a good thing in our life is not easy. What more when we have to do something that is not our passion.       

  

Most or all of the subjects that we have taken required us to use computer for completing the assignments. Sometimes, the lecturers even asked us to bring our laptop to class for lesson purpose. Among the courses that required us to use computer at the optimum level were American Literature and Linguistics for Students of Literature.

In Kak Mei’s American Literature class, we were required to produce our own video telling about our journey in finding the most interesting occupations in Malaysia. Some of us managed to meet professional photographer, kerepok lekor producer, putu bamboo maker and many more. It was fun. Some of us played the role as a videographer who captured the important scenes and some of us became the interviewers.

Once we have completed the journey, we knew that the most crucial part of this assignment was ‘video-making’. Some of us knew nothing about video-making. Some of us just said, “let us use Movie Maker as it is the easiest one. Actually, that is the only one that I know. hehe” Although some of us might only use the simplest video-maker, the video turned out to be something that was amazing! As many of us were the beginners in video-making stuff, we appreciated every single effort that has been made by every single group as we knew that the process was hard and tedious.

This assignment has undergone the stage of Behaviourist CALL. It is because most of the interviews done for the video were conducted in Malay and we translated the conversation into English. Therefore, we used the computer mainly for the purpose of listening to our recording and translated it into English as the subtitles.

For Linguistics for Students of Literature class, we have been assigned to analyze the most interesting movie that was adapted from a novel. Even though we did not have the idea of doing it, we enjoyed it. We never thought that a linguist would have to critically analyze every single thing inserted in the movie. We used the video-cutter to extract a short significant scene in the movie to be analyzed from linguistic point of view. We need to ‘play’ and ‘stop’ many times in order to find even the smallest clue in that scene in order to understand the director’s motif of putting it.

By noticing and analyzing it, we came to know the crucial meaning in every single creation even the smallest one that is created by Allah. In completing this assignment, we think that we have went through the stage of integrative CALL as we used not only writing skill, but we also used listening skill at maximum level as we were required to analyze even the characters’ tone when they were talking. This assignment can be considered as using content-based method as the movie that we have chosen became the source for our language learning.