ESL Class Reflective Report

As an ESL student, and an introverted person, speaking in public is always a huge challenge for me. In fact, if Speech Communication is not a required course for every student, I think I would never enroll in this course. Nevertheless, during the process of taking this course, I realized that I have learned a lot, and this course is not so burdensome than I thought before, on the contrary, it is quite interesting to listen to other classmates’ speeches, and giving my own speeches in front of a group of people can effectively increase my confidence.
This semester we had four speeches at all, two informative speeches-- the speech designed to convey knowledge and understanding; one persuasive speech-- the speech of creating, reinforcing, or changing people’s beliefs or actions; and a problem-solving small group presentation-- a small group formed to solve a particular problem. For each of the speeches, the most important thing for me was to deal with the stage fright-- anxiety over the …show more content…
There was an episode when I prepared my persuasive speech: my initial topic was about adopting animals, then I found my topic was same with the other classmate, and our central idea was quite alike. To avoid repeating same things, I decided to change my topic to ADHD drugs, it was also a good topic because it was related to us college students. It was worth to prepare a new speech, because when I did research on this topic, I realized how ADHD drugs harmed addicted students and the severity of the problem. My persuasive speech was organized in a problem-cause-solution order, and I used sources from some authoritative medical websites, and one real-life case to support my ideas. I was nervous when I gave my new speech, so my delivery was a bit rushed, and as a result, my articulation became worse, I must say that articulation was the most serious challenge I