Throughout this semester I honestly didn’t expect to learn something I’ve never known. When I first joined this class, I thought I would simply improve my grammar and write a few essays. But instead, the course pushed me to understand language as something connected to identity, culture, and emotion. Through storytelling, reading writers like Tan and Jordan, experimenting with multimedia, and collaborating with classmates, I discovered how to think differently. In this reflection, I want to write the four most meaningful lessons I learned this semester and show the moments in my work that helped shape myself as a freshman, as a multilingual student and a growing writer.

First of all, in this course, I learned how to use personal storytelling to clarify who I am and why my voice matters. By writing my narrative essay How to Tame a Language was one of the recent and important assignments for me from this semester. Telling my personal story moving to the U.S. at seventeen, being taught in an American school, meeting my first High School English teacher Miss Clark, and eventually cerating my own Handcraft Club. All of these helped me understand myself in a deeper way. For example, when I wrote about my mother “I remember how tough it was for us to even think about this idea, my mom literally sold everything we got from furniture to our house. Hopefully not our souls (she just didn’t have enough time to find buyers),” I realized how much sacrifice and strength shaped my path to this amazing country. Evidence from my own writing shows this growth clearly when I wrote, “And this is exactly the moment when I started to understand something important about language. That we don’t always learn it the serious way… We learn it through people.” This line reflects how my narrative became a space to understand why English matters to me not as a school subject, but as a part of my life.

I also learned that sharing personal stories can make others feel less alone. When I was writing honestly it brought me joy because I knew people like me might read my work and connect to it. The professor’s feedback supported this growth even more. When she responded to my narrative with kindness and understanding, especially knowing her own parents went through the immigrant experience, I felt seen. Her support was part of the evidence of my development and in my cover letter, I wrote that her guidance “helped me shape my ideas with more confidence.” By telling stories was the beginning of finding my voice.

I developed strong analytical skills studying the politics and identity of English. Before this course, I had never thought deeply about the English language beyond its rules and vocabulary. But reading our class work assignments like Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and June Jordan’s “No One Matters More Than Me…” changed that. These texts became emotional confirmation that I was not alone in my experiences. Tan’s description of her mother’s English reminded me of times when I felt judged for speaking broken English. Jordan’s essay on Black English showed me how language can become a form of resistance and pride. In my synthesis essay, I wrote, “Language becomes more than grammar; it becomes a negotiation of identity.” This sentence shows how the assignments taught me to analyze texts with more depth.

Using these readings as evidence helped me connect academic ideas to my own immigrant story. I learned to identify themes like power, belonging, and linguistic discrimination. These texts calmed me and grounded me. They helped me see that people around the world experience similar challenges and that English is a school subject and it is a social and political tool. It’s really strengthened my writing and helped me use language intentionally.

I learned to translate written ideas into visual and multimedia storytelling.
Another major moment of learning came from the multimodal translation assignments. I had never imagined turning an essay into something visual or symbolic. At first, I felt stuck because I didn’t know how to represent emotions through images. But once I started, I felt a surprising sense of freedom. This became clear in my Translation 2 project, where I used videos of my hometown, the streets, the buildings, and the places that shaped me to show my identity as a Russian Asian. This evidence made the project personal and alive. The assignment made me feel “like a producer of my own life podcast.” It evoked creativity that I used to work with a long time ago. I used symbolism to show major things in simpler ways. I also used imagery to help understand that writing is not the only way to communicate. Sometimes visuals express things words cannot. This assignment revealed a new side of my creativity and gave me confidence to use in the future.

Because of this course, I developed my skills on how to collaborate, listen with patience and revise my writing with intention. For me, collaboration became one of the most transformative parts of the semester. Every workshop, peer  review moment and class discussion helped me understand my writing from new perspectives. When classmates commented on my drafts, they noticed things I would’ve never thought of. Their feedback became evidence of how much I still had to learn and how much I was growing. For example, one classmate pointed out that a paragraph in my essay felt “emotionally strong but structurally unclear,” and I revised it based on their suggestion. These moments taught me that revision is the major part of the  writing process. 

Looking back on this semester, I see how much I’ve grown as a writer. These four lessons of storytelling, critical analysis, creative translation and collaborative writing shaped my understanding of what the English language can be with a little more effort. I now know that language is, at its core, identity, connection, and power. It’s something I can play around with and something that turns out can shape me.