Reflection on Self as a Language Learner

My experience as a language learner dates back to just several years after I was born. My father was in the military at the time and for four years of my childhood my family was stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. During that time my parents chose to live off-base in a small German neighborhood and my mother would take me to the local bakery everyday after kindergarten. At six years old, I remember being nervous and unsure at first but was eventually placing our orders in German on my own. As a child, I needed reinforcement and confidence to speak another language, which I believe holds true at any age. My family moved back to the United States two years later and the only German I remember today is “acht weis brotien bitte” translated, “may I have eight white rolls please.”

It was almost ten years later when I would have my next experience as a language learner, this time in my freshman year of high school. I had a variety of teachers during four years of Spanish levels one through four; each had their own “unique” and entertaining qualities. The most common feeling though, was that my classmates and I didn’t think we were learning anything at the time. We focused mostly on grammar, straight from the text, and some days we would get to watch a Spanish soap opera but that was just a break from boring lectures and book exercises. My own past classroom experience has taught me the necessity of providing a variety of activities for covering material in order to keep the student’s attention and interest.

In order to fulfill the language requirement in college, I enrolled in the second part of an introductory Spanish class for review. From day one, my professor spoke nothing but Spanish to us during class. Quite a change from high school! While it was intimidating and challenging at first, I started to get used to it. We knew from the beginning of the semester not to rely on English during class, so we never became accustomed to that crutch. Because it was uncomfortable at first, the general reaction about this professor was negative. She was "too hard, strict, overboard, serious" - you name it, she was called it. I agreed that it was a difficult introductory course, but I thought she was a great teacher. I respected her for not letting all of us sail through the basics. While strict in her no-English rules, she was also very patient with everyone. She handled the variety of skill levels very well and was positive with everyone. I eventually signed up for more of her classes throughout my college years and she became one of my favorite and most challenging professors in my four years there. The passion that she showed everyday in the classroom made her an effective teacher semester after semester. Her passion had sparked us all as students; we now had more confidence in our language skills because she was constantly encouraging us to practice aloud in class (and in Spanish) at all times. After the semester, it was easy to look back and appreciate the challenge because of the effective results her methods produced.

Graduation from college began my three year hiatus from the language. Instead of continuing with my Spanish, I started working for an accounting firm where my only exposure to the language was an occasional lease agreement that I was asked to translate at work. It took me a while to realize that lease agreements in English are next to impossible to understand, and now I had to read a language I hadn’t practiced in several years. There went my confidence in Spanish!

This past February I quit my accounting job and enjoyed my most recent language learning experience while living in Barcelona, Spain for five weeks. It was so interesting to learn about the language priorities of the population there. The order of importance for the majority population in Barcelona is to speak Catalan first, then English, and then Spanish. What I found most often was a surprising number of people that speak all three languages in addition to others! I’m convinced that once a person acquires a second language, it becomes easier each time an additional language is attempted. As much as possible, I tried to use the little Spanish I remembered and slowly it came back to me. After only 5 weeks abroad, I felt more and more comfortable; successfully getting through restaurants, the pharmacy, the post office, etc. I believe that a great tool for practicing a second language is the opportunity for immersion. I traveled to Spain thinking that I could read and understand the language well but once I got there I had a hard time adjusting to the variety of accents and speed at which people were speaking. During my time in Spain, I thought speaking aloud was intimidating at first, but much like my college Spanish classes, the more I did it, the more confidence I gained to do it again.

Clearly, I still have a long way to go before being able to say that I am “fluent” in Spanish, even though I have been studying it for a while now. The on-again, off-again learning has not proven to be successful for me and that is another experience I will take with me into the classroom. My future ESOL students will need just as much practice with their second language as I do with mine.