Right now, we are ending Unit 1.  To me the most important assignment that I remember for Unit 1 is the essay that I wrote about air pollution.   The goal of this article was to let people know what they are putting into the air, and how to stop this pollution.  This is supposed to be an advocacy article because it is supposed to make people reduce air pollution.  The essay mostly explains how people are creating air pollution in Taiwan, and what they can do to reduce it.

Air pollution is a big issue in Taiwan, especially in middle and southern cities.  The reason for the north not having as much air pollution is because the middle and southern cities have a lot of factories.  Air pollution is not just in Taiwan, it also occurs in other countries in the world.  For example, the most air polluted country in the world in 2025 was Pakistan.  Most of the countries that are the most air polluted are underdeveloped countries, mostly in Africa, or south and west Asia.  Other countries with lots of air pollution are mostly southern and middle Taiwan, which have a lot of factories.  In Taiwan, air pollution is not as big a deal as in countries like Pakistan, so many people don’t see this as a big issue that needs to be worried about or fixed.  My article tries to raise awareness of air pollution in Taiwan by telling them about the issue, and advocating for change to everyday lives to help.

The intended audience for my article is the Taiwanese people and government because Taiwan’s air pollution needs every Taiwanese to work together to improve.  Taiwan’s air pollution is a big issue for people in Taiwan because it will make it easy to get sick in people’s lungs.  Air pollution in Taiwan also causes many problems for people that do activities like baseball or basketball, when they need to play outside, they need the air quality to be good, or they wouldn’t get sick.  For the essay, I made my tone more explanatory, so the audience can understand it even if they didn’t know about the problem before.  I also am trying to sound convincing by advocating for change to the air pollution problem in Taiwan.  The evidence that I got was from a website called IQ Air, which is also a company.  In fact, it was the company that made the 1st ever home air purifier in the world.  Therefore, I think that it is the most trustworthy web site.  My writing asked readers to try to change their everyday life, so everybody can have a better life to live through.

I got inspiration for the writing by learning about different types of news and how they can change people’s opinion.  If I revised my article, I could make it more formal.  This assignment taught me how I can influence the reader’s thoughts and use facts to let them believe me fully.  Overall, I think that I did pretty well, but next time, I want to make my writing more formal.

Unit 2 has been a big unit for me.  Through this unit, we explored many topics such as nuclear waste, but the most important topic of this unit was how different types of media change how people view the topic.  We even need to do projects that represent that topic and what we have learned from it.

How we learned about nuclear waste was through two different ways, the first is that we read the newspaper articles that the teacher has written by taking information from many real news articles on the internet, and putting them together.  The news articles that the teacher wrote were different though, he wrote 3 types, one was biased to the KMT（國民黨）, and one was biased to the DPP（民進黨）, and one was neutural.  This is because the two political parties have different points of view on this topic.  Even though we separated the articles based on parties, we didn't talk about anything to do with politics.  I think that this helped me with my reading abilities, it also helped me with my ability to identify biases in the media.  Right after the newspaper reading, we watched videos that were about the same topic, this time the videos were made by independent reporters, so I didn't see as many biases.  For me, it is easier to understand videos than understanding newspapers because videos are more interactive, and I think that is better for my learning and understanding abilities.

Right now, we are doing our final project.  In this project, we are continuing our topic about different types of media, but in this assignment, we are not just analyzing different types of media, we are making our own.  The topic on nuclear energy is being replaced, we are going to choose our own topic.  For me, it is the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.  I will be analyzing this historical event through three different types of media, a news paper article, an Instagram post, and an Instagram Reels short-form video.  Each of these media types have to be completed individually.  I think that this assignment helps me to not just see and understand what different types of media is like to make, but it puts me into the shoes of the people who are actually these content creators.  I am not saying that I am as good as them, I am just trying to make it clear that this assignment helps me to learn what it is like to be the people that make the media content.

I truly think that after this project, I have improved my way of media making, analysis, and critical thinking skills.  I will keep trying to work hard for the rest of my career as a student.

Unit 3 was very important for me because it taught about our very own Taiwanese history.  In this unit, we learned about the 228 event and the white terror.  We also learned about the iceberg model, where there is always more than one complicated factor that people aren’t aware of behind the scene.

For me personally, this unit was the most interesting one this semester because of what we learned throughout the lessons of the unit, and also the final project that I did, it is something that I have never done before.  In the lessons of this unit, we learned about the white terror that has terrorized the whole country of Taiwan for 43 years.  This is rare because we are learning about Taiwan’s history in our English Unit 3, we usually learn about history in history class.  That brings me to another thing that we learned about this unit, the iceberg model.  I think that the iceberg model is very important because it explains a lot of actions that are done by humans, especially.  For example, one of the underlying factors for the 228 event is that the KMT government was very corrupt with an authoritarian leader, Chiang Kai-Shek, after World War II  The people allowed this to happen because they knew that the CCP in China that wanted to defeat the KMT by taking over Taiwan, where the KMT had fled to after the Chinese Civil War was way more violent than the KMT.  This connects to Fahrenheit 451 because in Fahrenheit 451, the government banned books and used TV and seashell ear devices to control people’s thinking.  This is just like how the KMT government forced everyone to speak Mandarin Chinese at school and work because it is easier to control people when everyone speaks the same language.

For our final project, we can choose between many educational posters, infographics, discussion guides, etc…….  At the end, I chose to make an infographics poster that contains a brief description of the issue, a timeline of the 228 event, some photos, and a line graph of Taiwan’s industries throughout the years of the white terror.  This is very significant for me because this is the first time that I made an infographics poster.  Before making the poster, I even had to ask the teacher about the meaning of “infographics”, because of this project, I now have more choices for other future projects.  I can also use infographics to simplify information from my research for other people that I am trying to explain to.

This project has taught me many new things that I haven’t learned before, it also helped me to review old things like the history of Taiwan’s road to democracy.  I will not forget this information, and I will keep building skills and learning new knowledge.