Tuesday 8 September 2015


The Importance of English for Me


English has been inculcated in Singaporeans since young and play a pivotal role in our society. I started learning English since young and even though my parents aren’t English speakers, I still value the importance of English for my future especially in future job prospects. In secondary school, we learn English through composition and functional writing but for me, I found writing summaries as the most important element in appreciating the English language.

Summary writing requires one to understand the passage and condense their understanding of the passage in a short paragraph. Topics can range from stories to historical piece. Whatever the topics are, we can learn them through summarising them. In order to do so, your English needs to be good.

Considering I am pursuing an engineering major, I found English to be of great importance in defining scientific or mathematical terms for instances, mass and vectors. These are important as engineers need to know their definition. For example, mass is not weight as weight is based on gravitational pull on the object or the example of velocity where in definition is the negative or positive displacement of a moving object in comparison to speed.

English can also help me in the future when working in groups. As said before, many engineering terms are in English and when cooperating with potentially different nationalities, it is important to speak good English so that projects can be done correctly and quickly. Lastly, the last thing we want is people misinterpreting each other especially in finishing a deadline project.

(Edited on 17/09/15)

5 comments:

  1. Thanks, Mubin, for setting up your blog already and making this post. It's clear and concise. You seem to have mixed the two themes, providing significant info on how summarizing has helped you develop your English to date and then making a few statements on the value of English for you. Given your chosen major here at SIT, what would you say are the areas where English will be vital for you? In addition, how pivotal is English in your projected workplace? Answering these questions would give more substance to your reflection.

    Thanks for the effort!

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  3. I do feel that summary is an important element in appreciating English language as it test the writer understanding of the passage and grammar. However, in these days many of us forgot the real meaning of doing a summary. Instead of summarizing a passage we tend to copy chunks and chunks of sentences from the passage.

    Let's help one another to improve on our English and in turn be able to write out a superb summary.

    Cheers :D

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  4. Hi Mubin, I have read through your blog and it is very clear to me that summary is very important. However I feel that the scientific terms in the engineering module has no link to English. If u are talking about why people are unable to understand the scientific terms like, mass is not weight, I would say it is because most of the time we had problem remembering the definition to fully solve a problem.

    Overall I find that you have written a good post because I am able to know your point of view on the importance of English.

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  5. I agree that writing a summary is a good skill to master as it shows whether someone really understands the whole content of the passage.It is very important to summarize the important points and not to miss out on any of the important points as it might change the meaning of the whole passage.

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