English reflection (2/9/13-8/9/13)

Monday: I started off in class still being hazy on the differences between instrumental power and influential power albeit reading a little on it in the guidebooks. Now, I understand instrumental power as being a power that is able to enforce authority whereas influential does not enforce, but is able to make you do something on your own initiative.

e.g: A Police has the instrumental power to make you stop your car, but only a sexy billboard ad has the influential power to make you stop your car.

Wednesday: Today in English, we read an excerpt from Robinson Crusoe to analyze power in the text. What was surprising was how racist it was in our modern day context but thinking of how it was a norm back when the book was originally written made us ponder. We finally found out how the meaning of the text comes from the reader, and not the vocabulary.

The next piece of writing that we had to analyze was an article entitled "Sickly immigrants add £1bn to NHS bill" in the Daily Mail. As it was a tabloid mail, we noticed how words work together to bring out stronger impacts e.g. complex+infectious+diseases. What I thought was that the combination stood as a much stronger value as opposed to just two or one of those words. This article was really interesting to analyze as at the end, I believed most of what it mentioned until we came to see that we have not read it with a "pinch of salt" as most of the 'facts' could have been misused for tabloid purposes.

Thursday: Today, we discussed two form of texts in the "Language & Power" textbook after analyzing them the night before. I've learnt a lot in terms of the usage of prosodic feature (volume, pitch, speed, tone), field-specific lexis (e.g. army= right parry, stripes, fall in, on guard), imperatives (commands, starts with a verb), interrogatives (conveyance of question to find faults) and taboo (e.g. arse, bloody, balls).

We also applied an extremely useful way to discuss, which is using a Socratic circle where half of the class listen and take notes while the other half discusses important points and changing places after a certain amount of time. This definitely gave people the chance to take a breather to absorb information and to be stimulated by the discussion to brainstorm ideas and also gave speakers a chance to speak comfortably within a smaller circle. This also gave us the opportunity to evaluate the quality of discussion as some speakers might be overbearing or some might simply avoid taking the initiative to be involved in active discussion.

I felt pitiful to some who tried hard in engaging with others. Some people did not bother trying to be proactive hence the workload is one-sided. I hope our class would break this barrier of shyness in the near future to encourage fruitful and better discussions.