Learning Strategies Diary

Monday, June 11th – Softball
Monday nights are always fun; I get to hang out with my old accounting co-workers on our company softball team. We’re not very good but it’s really just an excuse to get out of the office with the people you practically live with during tax season. Firm bonding outside the office always helps things when you’re back at work. I’ve always wanted to learn how to score a softball game and tonight, I did. My metacognitive strategy of “directed attention” was important, since I was learning while the game was going on. This was something that I was motivated to do and I had to keep myself focused instead of being distracted by exciting plays in the game. Actually scoring the game turned out to be an easier task than I thought. By using the cognitive strategy of “imagery,” I just had to assign each person in the field with a number. Picturing myself at second base with an assigned number and my teammates around me with their own numbers was an easy way to learn how to document each hit or out. We’re all accountants to keeping the actual score wasn’t a problem, although adding without our ten-key calculators took some practice!

Tuesday, June 12th – How to Perform an Incurred Cost Submission at Work
Until August, I am still doing some part-time work for an accounting firm in the area and at work today my manager asked if I had experience with an Incurred Cost Submission (ICS) for the government. She tasked another co-worker of mine and I to complete an ICS for a client that afternoon. Then my manager described the process several times and walked us through the key factors of the assignment. I used the metacognitive strategy of “delayed production” initially because I wanted to learn as much as I could from listening comprehension while she explained it. That strategy led naturally into the cognitive strategy of note taking. I didn’t have to write down the main idea but the important points and outline of the project requirements were helpful to refer back to when we had questions. Because I haven’t had much experience with this type of work, it was also necessary for me to use socioaffective strategies. First, my co-worker and I used “cooperation.” We worked together and pooled the information both of us could bring to the table to complete the project. Finally, we used the strategy “question for clarification” several times to make sure we were on the right track. It was helpful to get examples from our manager using this strategy in order to have something to work from and model after.

Wednesday, June 13th – Determine My Learning/Brain Type
Tonight I am going to give myself a test to see which type of learner I am. I have several that Dr. Robbins passed out at Thursday’s lecture which I’ll use tonight. My brief and informal hypothesis is that I will be “balance-brained” if there is such a thing. I think this may be true for several reasons but most importantly because of my career path thus far. I spent three years in public accounting before deciding to switch to ESL teaching. I love working with numbers (using my calculator of course) and my favorite subject in school was always math. From this, I could say that I’m predominantly left-brained and have a preference for things that are more concrete. On the other hand though, my second favorite subject in school was Spanish! I think I also have a creative and free side that has helped inspire me to become a teacher, which would make me more right-brained. Maybe that “no boundaries” feeling is why I ended up leaving accounting; it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy the numbers anymore. The third reason I’ll give in support of me being balance-brained is that sometimes I remember names; other times its faces, and most of the time I can come up with both! So which one am I, right or left brained? Or is it possible to be equally balanced between both? Maybe this test will help me figure it out.
After taking the test that Dr. Robbins gave out in class, I’ve discovered that I am “moderately left-brained.” This makes sense to me because I originally thought I was balanced-brained, meaning I didn’t prefer one side of my brain over the other. With these results, it shows that I have a slight tendency for my left side of my brain, but not by an overwhelming amount. While I primarily use logical reasoning and organized thoughts, that’s not the only way I function.

Thursday, June 14th – Esperanto in class
Tonight we had a very interesting presentation in class, the first expert group presented on L1 and L2 acquisition. Suzanne and Alexandra reviewed the background theories behind L1 and L2 acquisition and discussed their articles relating to each topic. What I found most entertaining about their presentation was the practical application activity that they had prepared for the class. They passed out ten sentences in Esperanto and asked the class to translate them into English. Ugh, I thought to myself, this is going to be embarrassing! It was amazing to see how many sentences we translated correctly having no exposure to the language before. In my own personal strategy for translating the sentences, the main method I used was my previous knowledge of my second language, Spanish. Using the cognitive strategy of “translation” I used the words and sentence structure as a base for understanding and related them to similar spellings and phrases in Spanish. I also used the cognitive strategy of “transfer” as I identified cognates first and linked my previous linguistic knowledge for this new language learning task. Once I had the general idea of the sentence, I was able to use “inferencing” and make a good guess at the other words in context. After a couple sentences were completed, it was easy to then take the patterns and vocabulary words from previous sentences to fill in the missing pieces. While I didn’t correctly translate all of them, it surprised me that I figured any out at all. This brief classroom experiment makes me curious to think about the probability of picking up an L2, L3, L4, etc. if the languages are similar. So, for example, using the same strategies that I did to translate Esperanto into English, would that make it easier for a person who learns Spanish as L2 to then pick up Italian as L3 because of the romance language similarities?

Friday, June 15th – Navigating a New Restaurant
Last night my boyfriend and I finally found some down time and had planned to go to dinner and a movie, just the two of us! I guess you can say this could be considered using the metacognitive strategy of “functional planning.” We discussed the components of the evening, selected a brand new restaurant in Ballston (Vapiano) and a newly released movie (Once), and worked out the logistics for meeting at a specific time and carrying out the plan, or as we liked to call it, a date! We arrived at the restaurant and the hostess greeted us, handed us each a plastic card, and told us to enjoy our meal. We had absolutely no idea what to do. He and I started to use the strategy of “deduction.” We walked around the place, saw that it was a pizza/pasta/salad bar-type restaurant, but we weren’t sure at all how it worked. We sat ourselves down in the back and tried to imitate others, were they helping themselves? What were they using the card for? Was a waitress serving each table? Finally, we had to resort to a socioaffective strategy and “question for clarification.” We went back up to the friendly hostess and she walked us through the process. In order to enjoy the meal, we used the cognitive strategy of “repetition.” The food was so delicious that we practiced and rehearsed eating with our many trips back up to the counter for more taste testing!