The first feedback I received was on my pecha kucha. The teacher told me to try to have more contact with the public. I know that having eye contact with everyone in the public is something I should work on and I will try to do better in the future. She also told me that I need to try to have more dynamic body language. I’m not a person who makes a lot of hand gestures when I’m talking so this will be hard for me. However, I will try to make some hand gestures every now and then during future presentations. The feedback I received from my fellow students was quite positive. They told me I spoke clear and made very few mistakes. According to them the subject of my pecha kucha was a bit boring because we already learned a lot about digital marketing in the “Integrated Marketing” course. They said that overall it was a good presentation.

The next feedback I received was on the press conference I gave (together with three other students) for the case of unit 11. The teacher told me I spoke calmly and fluent which is very good considering the fact we didn’t have much time to prepare and we couldn’t predict the questions the other students would ask us. However I made a big mistake and that was going personal. For the press conference we had to play game developers who were defending the violence in their game. When somebody said that professor X (I can’t remember his name) his research has shown that people behave more aggressive shortly after playing violent games, I said “it’s only one guy who says so” and this is something you definitely can’t say during a press conference. I will make sure to avoid making personal attacks in future press conferences.

The last feedback I received was on the presentation “persuading your audience”. We used good photos but we had to be more convincing. The presentation was more an informative one instead of a persuading one. We also need to make sure we know our audience. One of the things we talked about in the presentation was quitting smoking (this was my part) but only a few students in our class smoke so for the majority of the students this wasn’t interesting at all. The teacher also told us that when something we talk about in our presentation is mentioned in a previous presentation we should refer to it to show we’ve paid attention.

Personal reflection

For our previous PoPP we had to take the Dialing Test and my results were:

• Listening: C1
• Writing: C2
• Reading: C1
• Structures: C2
• Vocabulary: C1

To see if my listening, reading and vocabulary have improved I took the Dialing test again and the results (printscreens can be found below) were:

• Listening: C2
• Reading: C1
• Vocabulary: C2

Both my vocabulary and reading skill have increased to level C2 however, my reading is still at level C1. To reach level C2 I must be able to understand abstract and complex literary and non-literary writings. I must also be able to understand subtleties of style and the implicit meaning of a text. This is exactly what I struggle with, no matter in what language the text is written. I’m not good at finding the meaning of a text or the attitude of the writer when it’s implicitly stated. The reason this hasn’t improved since last semester is simple: neither in class or in my daily life I came in contact with abstract texts. The book we use in class is meant for people who want to go from level B1 to B2 so this won’t really help me and in my daily life the only texts I read are news articles and those aren’t usually very abstract or complex because they must be comprehensible for the general public.

Overall I’m very happy with my results, I managed to get a C2 score for listening, writing, structures, vocabulary and a C1 score for reading which is quite nice in my opinion. Hopefully English 3 will offer some more challenging texts to read so I can get my reading skill to level C2 as well.

Course assessment