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Ui Jeong Lee
Michelle Parsons
English 106
20 April 2014
Unit 4 Reflection

Dear Reader,
Having investigated a discourse community in my personal life, I was excited to start
working on the Unit 4 project and investigate the academic discourse community. I looked
forward to applying lessons I learned while examining my previous discourse community to
the academic discourse community. Among many academic fields, I chose education
research because, as an aspiring education administrator, I have been greatly attracted to this
field. In particular, analyzing how various teaching methods affect students learning abilities
has always fascinated me.
After writing my first draft, I received comments from my professor to improve the
content of my draft. My professors comments helped me to enrich my content. For instance,
in Part 1B, I added information about the search tool for each database in order to make the
list of database more informative. In addition, in Part 1C, I explained which journals are
considered the best within the field of education research using the professional evidence,
such as the Journal Influence Index and Paper Influence Index. Revising my draft allowed me
to gain a deeper understanding of the academic discourse community of the field of education
research.
Overall, I feel that my final draft well discusses the academic field of education
research. In particular, I feel good about Part 2B, in which I discuss two articles in the field.
It was especially fascinating how reading one article significantly influences my
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understanding of the other article. Moreover, as English is my second language, the way
articles discuss about methods of teaching English to foreign students was very informative.
With more time, I would like to improve on further enriching my content by incorporating
more details.
All in all, working on this project gave me an invaluable chance to deepen my
understanding of academic discourse communities. In the field of education research, I
learned about the publication standards, citation and formatting styles, and databases that are
widely used in this field. It is my hope that knowledge I gained from this project will be
immensely useful to my future endeavors as a student and later as an education administrator.

Sincerely,

Ui Jeong Lee