Yina Guo

The prospective and discussion of pathway program

Before I came to America, I knew little about pathway program. What I knew was that it was designed for those of the international students whose English was not good enough and it included language courses and major courses. I came to this program because my English fluency did not meet the university’s requirement, however, I did not know what these language courses can bring to me. I felt nervous for the unknown study life and felt excited for the life in America.

One of the courses in pathway program is EAP, the teacher told me that this class will teach us academic writing. However, during the study of it, I could not understand the significance of this class in the first place. My initial sense was that the homework in EAP class was endless and usefulness. Because of my major, I do not need to write any paper until now, so I thought this class and the homework was a waste of time. I even had no time to learn my major knowledge and get plenty of sleep. For a long time, I went to bed at 2am. For instance, last semester I had EAP class on Tuesday and Thursday, and Wednesday evening I had Applied Statistics course until 10pm. I remember that very clearly because our EAP homework was writing summary for an article which had almost fifteen pages. We got this homework on Tuesday and it dues on Thursday morning. It was really difficult for me because of my limited English skill and also had not learnt the way to finish a summary yet. Unfortunately, I had to finish my major class homework due on Wednesday. As a result of these reasons, I had not read the article when I finished my major class, that means, 10pm on Wednesday. I felt depressed, upset and helpless. I did not understand why I should do this or the reason I should keep doing this, and I was even crying while writing.

In addition to the endless homework, I never noticed the rules in American writing such as plagiarism in the past. I thought it was enough as long as the professor did not find or notice that and I never paid more attention to citation. Many of the pathway class mates was making the same mistake and we all got an alert email from professor about the plagiarism warning. As you can imagine, my journal analysis paper for that week’s assignment got a very low grades.

Looking back, after finishing the EAP’s assignments step by step, I had a better understanding of these homework and knowledge. The way to write summary helped me to catch the main contents quickly and correctly. Obviously, this skill will save me time and benefit for my future reading. What else, the analysis papers helped me a lot in my major field. For instance, through journal analysis, I know how to find the professional field journal and how to learn more about this journal. After that, we should choose an article and analyzed it. From the article analysis and language analysis about the article, I learned how to organized an academic article. Clear logic is extremely important for an article. Thus, we should learn the structure and use it in our future academic writing. The article analysis paper helped me to gain insight organization of an article. What else, this was the first time that I noticed the language usage in an article. In the past I thought it was enough to write down what I want to express and never considered about how to write to make it more professional. However, from this analysis, I learned the ways to write in more professional expressions such as using complex noun phrases, using single verb instead of verb phrase.

All in all, the EAP class in graduate pathway program gave me a chance to learn academic writing and all the pathway courses gave me time to adapt American study and life. If I was admitted by the school directly and did not take part in the pathway program, I will very likely have a difficult time on following professors’ classes and accommodate graduate study in US. Also, I will still have the intentional plagiarism problem which might not be noticed by myself and it will definitely make a serious issue in the future study. What I have experienced during my pathway program really can help me successfully prepare my graduate study. In the rest of the EAP courses, at the same time of finishing homework, I will try to understand the purpose that the professor assign. Through this, I will learn and use the knowledge in the future.