The challenge of academic writing for Chinese students within ...

At the age of five years old, I went to school. I only needed to learn Chinese and
mathematics, but my study turned out a mess. Usually I failed the exams. My grandparents
did not pay much attention to me, neither did they help me. I made great progress until I was
in Grade two. There was an uncle living near me. He was fierce, for sometimes he hit me. I
was afraid of him. However, it was he who taught me mathematics. In just a few minutes, I
managed to do the simple calculations of plus and minus with his teaching. When I grew up, I
tried to analyze why I could succeed to learn from him. The reason I got was that he was
serious then I was forced to learn otherwise I would receive a good beating. After his
teaching, I found that mathematics was not that hard and even Chinese was easy to handle.
In a short time, I caught up with my classmates and even became one of the top students.
Now I can still clearly remember that it was in October, 1996, when I was in Grade Four.
That was the date when my parents asked me to go to Shenzhen to study. I went to a boarding
school where I was in Grade Three. My parents had a concern that I could not keep up with
my classmates because I had not learned any English in my hometown. In Shenzhen, students
began to learn English when they were in Grade One while the English teaching was not
supposed to be taught in the primary school in my hometown. So when I began Grade Three
in Shenzhen, I even could not pronounce the basic 26 English letters. You could imagine how
hard it was for me. The teacher preferred to speak English in the class and I did not
understand a word. I could only guess the meanings from the facial expression and body
language of the teacher. I did well in my study of Chinese and mathematics but I was an idiot
in English. Luckily, a new teacher came into my life and he was very interesting. He taught us
to sing simple English songs. Even though I could not exactly pronounce the words, I could
imitate his voice. Because of his attractiveness, he stopped me from giving up my English
study. At the end of the term, my English score was the highest of the class. Even now when I
trace back to those days, I still feel lucky and grateful. Thanks to the interesting teacher, he
led me into the English world and made me find out how fantastic English was. In my study
life, that teacher played a significant role. I dare not imagine, without that teacher, without
his leading, where I would be now. Maybe I would have already given up English, not to
mention study in the UK.
I keep studying English and find English is the easiest subject for me. I cannot say I have tons
of passion in English. I think maybe I am good at memorizing so English is always within me.
However, I am bad at English listening. I think it was because I was always lazy in doing
exercises in listening. From junior school to high school, I did not ever speak English after
English classes. I had the habit of reading English every other morning, therefore my
speaking was not as poor as my listening.
I like studying English, yet I am fed up with the multiple choice questions of grammar. When
I chose my major at my preferred university, I avoided the department of English. In my
subconscious mind, English was only a tool to learn other knowledge. Now every student in
China is learning English and I did not see it was promising to take English as my future
career. So I picked Business Communication which combined English and business. As a
result, I went to the School of Translation and Interpretation in Sun Yat-Sen University. I
thought I was going to learn English based on business things, such as business technical
terms. However, I was not right. During the two years in the School of Translation and
Interpretation, we seldom learned something related to business. In fact, we acted as English
majors and had the same course as the Department of English did. Besides, we learned our
second foreign language and I chose Japanese. So we learned two languages at the same
time. We had to memorize lots of vocabulary and study was not that easy for me.
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