Paper 1 - B - English Writing PDF

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A self placement essay was required as part of our first mandatory assignment....

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Shivam Agarwal

NUID: 001627233

Self-placement Essay Shivam Agarwal Once when I was in high school, our English teacher randomly selected some of the students from class to perform one of the plays we were being taught in class. The name of the play was “A StreetCar Named Desire” where I was chosen to play the role of “Mitch”, one of the friends of the antagonist in the play. At that time, I did not have a lot of interest in such type of things but as we were rehearsing the play, everyday my teacher came upto me and appreciated the effort I was putting towards the character. As we acted out on the final day, I was given a lot of credit for the success of the play due to which I caught interest in speaking and improving my fluency in English. From that day onwards, I started listening to all the lectures carefully and also started practicing writing at home. All of this started when I took the IB course my school offered when I was in high school. I completed my high school from Pathways World School, New Delhi in India which was had the IBDP program due to which we had to take English as our first or the second language. As I was going to take my mother tongue as one of the languages, so I preferred taking English as my first language as I would be able to learn and practice it more. There were four parts in English as my first language which consisted of two langauge and two literature portions. The language portion included ‘Language in cultural context’ and ‘Language and Mass communication’ whereas the literature portion had ‘Literature-texts and contexts’ and ‘Literature-critical study’. For th first part of the language portion, we were taught the importance of language in the world and were told how to analyze posters, advertisments and even images as how it targets the audience it needs to be reached and what effect does it have on the reader’s mind. For the second

Shivam Agarwal

NUID: 001627233

part of language, we were taught how language has different methods through which the world communicates and we were also taught how to write essays using the main motives of language which usually consisted of the target audience and the literary devices used by the author/ illustrator. In the first literature part of my course, I had to read a poem – “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and a book – “Things Fall Apart”. After reading both the genres, I had to give a presentation on either one of these genres. I gave my presentation on the poem not because I had’nt read the book properly but because the poem and the literary devices used in it attracted me to a point where I read the poem thrice in a week just so that I could give the presentation without any concerns. In the second part of my literature program, we were given two more books but this time both were of the same genre. “A StreetCar Named Desire” and “Medea”. As I read these books, I had to write a comparative analysis on the books for my final exam.To completely make us familiar with these books, our teacher would sometimes ask us to perform short plays on a certain part of the book. As the final exams of IB finished, I ended up getting a 5 in English which was’nt probably the score I expected because I had put in a lot of effore for my exams but still, the points were the nonetheless pleasing to my classmates as they had got lesser grades in comparison. So as I have gotten admission in Northeastern University, I am really lookig forward to my english subject. I had researched a lot on this subject and found out that Northeastern offers three courses in English which includes First year writing, first year writing for multlingual writers and introductory firs year writers. The last one is for students who might need to take an extra semester in English to cover up with the course but as I have quite a lot of experience in English reading ad writing, I am quite sure that I don’t need to take that course. I have decided to take the course which has just the first year writing because that seems ideal for me as the remaining option is for the students whose first or the strongest language is not English

Shivam Agarwal

NUID: 001627233

but as I have already mentioned in this essay, my first language for the last two years has been English which is why believe theat even this option isnt suitable for me. To conclude, I would say that my IB course has really polished my English reading and writing skills and I believe that I am pretty confident now to take up the course, I have taken and even excel in it....