Academic English–Reflective Writing (Cross cultural communication)
In a workshop on my first project at LCC, we were asked to design a game as a team for the first time. This group was divided into three tasks, making game rules, designing game characters and designing game board. When we were divided into groups and had a discussion, I was very nervous because I was not very confident in my English. We all come from different countries, so English is not our first language. In addition, as a result of the epidemic, we were taking online classes and we haven’t met several times before, which makes us feel strange and shy.
At the beginning of the discussion, sometimes we could not understand the key words of each other’s narrative because our English was not standard enough.And our English level are uneven, some students speak fast, so I have no idea what they are saying. Therefore we typed the content into the chat room and we started by talking about examples that we could use, and each of us wanted to use the games that we knew about as examples. But unfortunately, neither of us had heard of the other’s games, so we were stuck in a stalemate. At this time, a Korean girl told us that she thought a famous game, German Heart Disease, and she introduced it to us. Under her introduction, we learned about the game and used it as a reference. However, we had a problem with the division of labor, because the game we were making didn’t have a game board, so we had a heated discussion. One classmate proposed to make other games, but we didn’t have enough time to do another game, so I suggested to replace the game board with the game cover and other people all agree this idea.
In the end, our results were very successful. In this group cooperation, I learned that it is important to learn English well and that when discussing problems, we should put forward our opinions according to the reality instead of making pointless arguments or making ridiculous opinions. If I will have cross-cultural communication again, I will try my best to speak English as standard as possible, so that we will not feel difficult in communication. In addition, I will get to know my classmates first, so that we can be confident in the group discussion instead of feeling strange.