Learning Strategies Diary, part 2

Learning Strategies Diary

5/25/07

Situation: Substitute teaching assignment

Metacognitive Strategies: I used the strategy of planning/organizing to learn the lessons plans by reading the notes left by the absent teacher. I also rehearsed the plans step-by-step.
I managed the learning environment by turning off the overhead light and opening the blinds.

Task-Based Strategies: I used yellow highlighter to draw my attention to things I didn't want to forget in the written plans.

I accessed two information source when I had to learn the whereabouts of a student in order to pull him out for ESOL instruction.

5/26/07

Situation: Golf Tournament

Metacognitive Strategies: I identified several problems from the outset-I didn't know the pairings(who was playing with whom); I didn't know the layout of the golf course; the leader board seemed like L2 to me!

Task-Based Strategies: I found an information sheet that had the names of the pairings and their tee times. This same sheet had a map of the course. I connected the images on the map to concrete places (water hazards, flags on putting greens, buildings, etc.) I also used the sheet to make connections to the leader board. Thus, I was able to determine the standings and the scores.

5/27/07

Situation: Rolling Thunder event

Metacognitive Strategies: I planned the event by going to the organization's website to get the time and location. I accessed a website with a map of downtown DC to determine which subway station was closest to the planned stakeout. Afterwards, I evaluated the field trip and decided that I would definitely take more water next time and a thicker blanket for resting and picnicking.

Task-Based Strategies: Once we reached the Metro station, I had to calculate the cost of adding value to an existing SmarTrip versus buying a new SmarTrip versus buying a farecard. I used the information that the farecard machine gave me to make my decision. (There was a lot of self-talk going on here.)

Morphemes & Stuff

Please forgive any errors...this is from a reading response I did for 227.

Emergent Literacy:

Children begin to develop written language knowledge from the moment they are first exposed to reading and writing at home during their preschool years.

Reading Readiness:

Traditional view of reading instruction that assumes that children must be able to perform certain auditory, visual, psychomotor, and linguistic tasks in order to show the maturity needed for reading instruction.

Phoneme:

The smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in meaning in a language.

A member of the set of the smallest units of speech that serve to distinguish one utterance from another in a language or dialect - the /p/ of English pat and the /f/ of English fat are two different phonemes.

Morpheme

A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. (Minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units .)

Grapheme:

The letter or letter combination that represents a sound (phoneme).

Phonemic Awareness:

Awareness of individual sounds that constitute spoken words.

Phonics:

A method of teaching people to read in which they are taught to recognize the sounds that letters represent.

Onset:

The initial consonant in a word or syllable, followed by a vowel-consonant sequence (the rime).

Ex.: gain

g – onset
ain- rime

Digraphs:

Two consonants together that make one sound (th, ch, ph).

Blends:

Two consonants together that blend their sounds (cl, bl, tr, cr, pr).


What is the critical period hypothesis?

Linguist Eric Lenneberg (1964) stated that the crucial period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. He claimed that if no language is learned before then, it could never be learned in a normal and fully functional sense." (Wikipedia, 2006) This theory became known as The Critical Period Hypothesis and it refers to the specific time period in which language learning best occurs.

Prescriptive grammar

Rules of grammar as prescribed by grammarians; i.e., what the rules should be as opposed to what they are.

Descriptive grammar

Observation of the use of grammar, with no value judgment as to what the rules should be.

I first began learning a language in sixth grade. I was the first generation of students in my hometown to participate in the “Sixth Grade Experience.” Students who scored well on reading comprehension exams had the opportunity to take French and Spanish for a half-year each. The point was to expose us to the languages so that we would be able to make an educated decision about which language we would chose to study the following year and throughout highschool. Although I began studying a language in sixth grade and I continued my studies through highschool, I was not passionate about learning a language until about half way through college.

As I reflect on my experience as a second language learner, I realize that I am probably not the typical foreign language learner. In highschool, I opted out from taking the AP Spanish class. I was not interested at the time, I didn’t think it was important, and I was attempting to avoid as much homework as possible for my senior year of highschool. However, when I began college, I chose to take a Spanish class during my freshman year. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in, but I had always been interested in Spanish, and I liked the idea of being able to speak a second language. My first college course was a disaster. I was in an advanced grammar course, taught by a native speaker. I was the only student who was not a native speaker in the class, and the only freshman. In fact, the other students were all seniors, majoring in Spanish. The level that the native speakers brought to the class made the whole course far too challenging for my language ability, and it actually caused me to become disinterested in learning the language. As my college education continued, I decided that I wanted to study abroad. Since I was almost done with my graduation requirements for my chosen major, my academic advisor suggested that I study abroad in a country where I did not speak the language. I was able to study in Spain because I had taken that one course freshman year that was a requirement for the program. It was the experience in Spain that changed my entire language learning experience.

I learned a lot in my classes abroad, but it was my experiences with native speakers that taught me the most. I wanted to be able to communicate, especially with my host family, and I learned more from that experience than I could in any classroom. I was inspired from this experience, and when I returned, I decided to pick up a second major in Spanish. My abilities had drastically improved from the immersion experience, and I felt much more comfortable and confident in the language classes. I carried what I learned and my experience with me in the years following graduation, and this served as part of the motivation for me to become a language teacher. I am passionate about learning Spanish and experiencing the associated cultures that I hope to pass this on to other language learners. For me, the most exciting thing about learning a language is learning the culture associated with the language. It is a personal belief that I hold that one cannot truly understand the culture without understanding the associated

LANGUAGE LEARNING REFLECTIONS

I love learning foreign languages! When it comes to learning a foreign language, for me, listening and modeling are key. Learning the elemental sounds - the basic and unique units of the spoken language – is the most important and this even supercedes connecting meaning to the sounds. This is not so easy, since there are often no direct equivalents to the sounds we have in English. When first learning a foreign language, I will begin with the basic phrases like “Hello”, “Yes”, “No” and “Thank you”. But later on, when learning vocabulary, I will sometimes acquire words without understanding their meanings right away. It sometimes happens that with street names, or names of cities, or towns, or people’s names for example, I will have an “Ah-HA!” moment later on, and understand that the word is not only just a name, like “John”, but it actually means something, too, like “Rose” or “Sunday”.
I also find that MUSIC is a great way to learn languages. After learning individual words and phrases, music really helps with learning intonation and patterns within sentences, and helps me model them authentically. I find that there is an amazing retention factor to music. And of course if you can sing in a foreign language, native speakers are always impressed and will be much more open to talking and communicating with you.
My foreign language strengths are speaking and communicating, rather than reading and writing. Writing Kanji in Japanese is very challenging, and after years of study, unfortunately, I still only have really learned the very basic characters. I am not a visual learner – it is a real challenge for me, for example to read a Japanese newspaper, despite the fact I have studied Japanese for a number of years. The characters all start to look alike after a while!
For me, the difficulty arises when attaching meaning to the visual characters. Japanese characters are extremely complicated with some containing up to 20 or more strokes! In addition, each character in Japanese has an “on” or “kun” reading – the Japanese or the original Chinese pronunciation, so each Japanese character can be pronounced in more than one way. Consequently, it regularly happens that I can read a sentence in Japanese and understand it, but not be able to read it aloud, because I have not connected the visual to the pronunciation.
When learning a language, I tend to “chunk” information, clumping words and phrases together and learn them as one unit of meaning. It is difficult - nearly impossible to dissect each and every word in a sentence and define each word in before speaking, so “chunking” is a much more effective and efficient a way to process information.
In addition, when first learning a language, my strategy is to seek out kids to talk to. For me, children are the most effective teachers. Children use simple “baby-language” and will laugh when you make a mistake, not correct you and try and explain the mistake as adults do. Acquiring language from children comes in a low-anxiety environment, where you can learn and have fun without the fear of making mistakes.
As I wander through the Borders and Barnes and Noble through their foreign language sections, I am always amused at some of the titles of the books - “Learn Italian in 10 minutes a day!” , “The Fast Way to German”, and “Easy Japanese”, which I think is an oxymoron. In reality, no one can learn a language literally overnight, and it takes a lot of practice and diligence to learn to read, speak and write a foreign language.
I met an elderly gentleman few years ago as I was beginning to learn Japanese, an American, who spoke amazing Japanese. He told me that it is easy to learn the basics in Japanese, but it is very difficult to learn Japanese well. It is my constant goal, to slowly, over time, learn grow and develop my foreign language capacities.

My language learning experience (reposted under new account!) :)

My language learning experience has been affected by a multitude of events and circumstances that have motivated and encouraged me to appreciate and love learning foreign languages. As the daughter of Uruguayan parents, I was raised in both the English and Spanish language. My parents insisted that my sisters and I speak Spanish at home, particularly the dinner table, while English was spoken outside of the home and while doing school work. Fortunately, the combination worked wonders. I grew up speaking both languages fluently, without an accent in either language (or so I’m told). In pursuit of becoming trilingual, I look German in high school and found it rather easy to learn a new language. Perhaps it was my knowledge of grammatical patterns or my comfort with practicing pronunciation without the fear of making mistakes that made language learning fun. It was in my German class that I realized that I learn languages best through emulating others. My German teacher was the only native speaker I knew of, therefore, I would make a conscious effort to study her accent, pitch, etc. and copy what I heard. While I was in college, I spent a year abroad in Spain. Though I am a native Spanish speaker, it was amazing to be surrounding by the distinct Spanish of the Spaniards (known as Castilian, although many in the southern portion of South America claim to speak Castilian as well). Being immersed in a form of Spanish that was unnatural to me was very tricky! While basic communication was relatively simple, certain words and phrases had different meanings- and many times, I learned that the hard way. While studying Moroccan Arabic in Morocco, I was fully immersed in a language and culture that I was not very familiar with. Linguistically, Spanish and Arabic have several similarities, however, I spent several hours a day listening to Moroccan people speak. I would not speak English and forced myself to use the little vocabulary I did learn on a day to day basis. A few of my classmates and I would dialog as much as possible in Arabic. We would also practice our oral and writing skills with Moroccans who were attempting to do the same in learning English. Once I came back, I attempted to continue my study of the language through the Rosetta Stone program. While I was impressed with the learning strategies used, I found that I gained more through personal interaction and feedback rather than following a computer program with a variety of limitations. While there are amazing teachers who are non-native fluent in any given language, I believe that having native language-speaking teachers, or more importantly, immersing myself into a specific language and culture is the way in which I have succeeded most in my language learning experiences. I have yet to master any language as well as English and Spanish but I have not given up just yet!