"How do we identify a cultural pattern in writing, if there truly is such a thing?" I questioned after I read the readings focused on contrastive rhetoric for today. Contrastive rhetoric, or CR, appears to be one field of study that truly fires researchers up, regardless of whether they stand on the for or against side. I do believe that nearly every culture has some genre or other aspect of writing that is unique to that particular culture. Maybe instead of that ubiquitous five paragraph essay they have a four paragraph one or something else along those lines.
Yet, I am wary of putting such stringent labels on groups of people's writing. It was said that Kaplan's doodles were "widely cited for their intuitively compelling 'truths' and equally criticized for overgeneralizing a highly complex idea" (Casanave 28). In his doodles, English writing is represented as a straight line. I believe that the Connor makes a great point in her article when she questions whether speakers of other languages would even see English texts as straight-forward. If I am asked to read a text from a genre, etc. that I am not familiar with-but told beforehand that it was straightforward-I'm not sure that I would think it to be.
We also must be careful in lumping everyone from the same place/culture together. How does one know how a person truly grew up or learned how to write? I'm sure that if someone would look at the writing of people living on my same block, he or she would absolutely find some differences, maybe even ones that affected the very form of the writing.
I want to take the remainder of this blog to consider some ideas for my research project for class. As of now, I have simply a broad scope of what I want to focus on. It's the narrowing down part that appears to be a bit rough. I know that I want to research the writing of 6- 12 grade ESL students, or those students in secondary school in the United States specifically... perhaps how content area teachers with no ESL experience can better teach ESL students mainstreamed into their classroom. What techniques have been shown to improve their writing? How does grading/rubrics change when asked to teach a class with everyone from accelerated native students to ESL students with little L1 background knowledge? These questions are simply where I am at right now; I am sure the focus will change, even if slightly, by tomorrow even.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
English 344: Tuesday, February 1
I found this week's readings to be quite interesting, and I will touch on a few such points in the following paragraphs. However, I wanted to begin with my own "musings" on why some people succeed in second language acquisition while others do not. As both Lightbown/Spada and Saville-Troike noted, numerous factors go into predicting whether a person will be successful in acquiring one. Yet, these factors are simple predicters, not sure things at all, and I was constantly reminded of my time coaching track as I read. I remember some athletes had so much natural talent for the sport, yet could never succeed when they needed to even when they worked hard in practice. Why? I remember others who had little talent yet somehow drew all of it out of them everytime they ran and succeeded. Was motivation purely a factor here? What other extrinsic or intrinsic forces were at work? I think that second language acquisition is much like trying to run one's best; at any given time, numerous factors are constantly at work on each individual. Thus, it is most definitely a challenge to pin down exactly what causes someone to succeed and while another does not.
I found one portion of the readings to be particularly useful to teachers. Lightbown/Spada reports a "high level of student and teacher satisfaction when students were matched with compatible teaching environments" (58). I have had teachers who only lectured to classes, and I strongly dislike this because I know that I'm a visual learner. If I had a second language teacher simply lecturing, I doubt that I would do as well as I could in the class. How can teachers always make sure they are accomodating the learning styles of all students?
Finally, I am quite curious about the social dynamic and power relationship between various language spoken of by Lightbown/Spada. Learning a language (or simply learning in general) is never done in a vacuum. How is learning this new language affecting a student outside of the classroom? Is this a socially acceptable thing to do? I believe that this applies more to younger ESL students in K-12 rather than international students studying at universities; still, digging deeper into the social ramifications of the second language acqisition would be interesting.
I found one portion of the readings to be particularly useful to teachers. Lightbown/Spada reports a "high level of student and teacher satisfaction when students were matched with compatible teaching environments" (58). I have had teachers who only lectured to classes, and I strongly dislike this because I know that I'm a visual learner. If I had a second language teacher simply lecturing, I doubt that I would do as well as I could in the class. How can teachers always make sure they are accomodating the learning styles of all students?
Finally, I am quite curious about the social dynamic and power relationship between various language spoken of by Lightbown/Spada. Learning a language (or simply learning in general) is never done in a vacuum. How is learning this new language affecting a student outside of the classroom? Is this a socially acceptable thing to do? I believe that this applies more to younger ESL students in K-12 rather than international students studying at universities; still, digging deeper into the social ramifications of the second language acqisition would be interesting.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
English 344: The Wild Child
I will admit that rarely am I completely into a movie shown in a classroom. Even if the subject of the movie interests me, my mind will inevitable wander as I watch. This was not the case with The Wild Child. The film completely held my interest despite the fact that it was in French. I found the movie simply fascinating, largely because it was based on a true case. As I watched, topics that we had discussed in class continually arose for me.
One such topic is featured in discussion question number five: "Do you think Victor's case supports Critical Period Hypothesis?" In this blog post, I take the easy answer, that of partially yes and partially no. CPH claims that "children have only a limited number of years during which they can acquire their L1 flawlessly; if they suffered brain damage to the language areas, brain plasticity would allow other areas of the brain to take over the language functions of the damaged areas, but beyond a certain age, normal language development would not be possible" (Saville-Troike 187). When the villagers found Victor at eleven or twelve, he was very much past this "certain age" and they say he had never, ever been exposed to the language. Instead of gradually learning the language as a young child, he had to suddenly take lessons to learn the language. At the end of the movie, he appeared to gain understanding of the language, but could produce almost no sounds. What the CPH claims appears to be taking place with Victor.
Yet, I do partly question absolutely claiming that this proves the Critical Period Hypothesis. Victor's case is just so extreme. Not only was he never exposed to human speech, but he was forced to defend himself from animal attacks, hunt his own food, find shelter. In those six or seven years when he was alone, no one truly knows what happened to him. Without that information, I am not sure how one could draw a sound conclusion about his case. How would this sort of life in itself affect a person's age at development? There simply appears to be too many variables to completely affirm the CPH.
One such topic is featured in discussion question number five: "Do you think Victor's case supports Critical Period Hypothesis?" In this blog post, I take the easy answer, that of partially yes and partially no. CPH claims that "children have only a limited number of years during which they can acquire their L1 flawlessly; if they suffered brain damage to the language areas, brain plasticity would allow other areas of the brain to take over the language functions of the damaged areas, but beyond a certain age, normal language development would not be possible" (Saville-Troike 187). When the villagers found Victor at eleven or twelve, he was very much past this "certain age" and they say he had never, ever been exposed to the language. Instead of gradually learning the language as a young child, he had to suddenly take lessons to learn the language. At the end of the movie, he appeared to gain understanding of the language, but could produce almost no sounds. What the CPH claims appears to be taking place with Victor.
Yet, I do partly question absolutely claiming that this proves the Critical Period Hypothesis. Victor's case is just so extreme. Not only was he never exposed to human speech, but he was forced to defend himself from animal attacks, hunt his own food, find shelter. In those six or seven years when he was alone, no one truly knows what happened to him. Without that information, I am not sure how one could draw a sound conclusion about his case. How would this sort of life in itself affect a person's age at development? There simply appears to be too many variables to completely affirm the CPH.
Monday, January 24, 2011
English 344: Tuesday, January 25th
I begin this post with a brief overview of my own "learning journey" thus far in the semester. I came into this term with very little background in TESOL, ESL, etc., and, a mere three weeks into the semester, I find that I am slowly beginning to understand some of the differences that I can make as a teacher when teaching ESL students versus traditional L1 students. Yet, as this blog will clarify, these three weeks have also led to many questions that do not have easy, or any, correct answer to them...
In my previous post found below that was written for English 495, I wrote about the "grammar/error correction" debate currently going on in the SLA field, and I wish to continue on with that topic again here, as items in the readings for this particular class prompted further interest in the topic for me. At one point, Saville-Troike speaks of the Error Analysis approach to SLA. While I am not going into detail on the approach here, I do want to bring up one quotation in that section that I found very interesting: "... focus on L2 learners' errors not as "bad habits" to be eradicated, but as sources of insight into the learning processes" (38). In class last week, we learned about interlanguage, that system of language of someone who is attempting to learn a new language. The error viewpoint expressed above seems to have this interlanguage in mind, as "errors provide evidence of the system of language which a learner is using at any particular point in the course of L2 development." Yet I am curious: At what point can those "errors" that may show L2 development be considered mistakes, or lapses in judgment? How can teachers tell the difference without studying the writing of students in great detail, especially when there are very likely many, many different levels of L2 development in one classroom? No simple standard for this can possibly exist.
Another point of interest in today's readings for me was where Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device fit into second language acquisition. The readings in Savile-Troike question whether learners still have access to Universal Grammar when learning a second language, and I am extremely curious about this. I can only assume that age plays a huge role in this, as the Universal Grammar may evenutally fade as the years go by. Is this why, as Lightbown/Spada suggest, older learners use more problem solving abilities because they no longer have access to that innate language abililty? How does the age of the ESL student affect the lesson plans that teachers create each day? Should the potential innate ability of some students at younger ages be taken into consideration?
In my previous post found below that was written for English 495, I wrote about the "grammar/error correction" debate currently going on in the SLA field, and I wish to continue on with that topic again here, as items in the readings for this particular class prompted further interest in the topic for me. At one point, Saville-Troike speaks of the Error Analysis approach to SLA. While I am not going into detail on the approach here, I do want to bring up one quotation in that section that I found very interesting: "... focus on L2 learners' errors not as "bad habits" to be eradicated, but as sources of insight into the learning processes" (38). In class last week, we learned about interlanguage, that system of language of someone who is attempting to learn a new language. The error viewpoint expressed above seems to have this interlanguage in mind, as "errors provide evidence of the system of language which a learner is using at any particular point in the course of L2 development." Yet I am curious: At what point can those "errors" that may show L2 development be considered mistakes, or lapses in judgment? How can teachers tell the difference without studying the writing of students in great detail, especially when there are very likely many, many different levels of L2 development in one classroom? No simple standard for this can possibly exist.
Another point of interest in today's readings for me was where Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device fit into second language acquisition. The readings in Savile-Troike question whether learners still have access to Universal Grammar when learning a second language, and I am extremely curious about this. I can only assume that age plays a huge role in this, as the Universal Grammar may evenutally fade as the years go by. Is this why, as Lightbown/Spada suggest, older learners use more problem solving abilities because they no longer have access to that innate language abililty? How does the age of the ESL student affect the lesson plans that teachers create each day? Should the potential innate ability of some students at younger ages be taken into consideration?
English 495: Tuesday, January 25
"Students have no reason to pay attention to feedback on final drafts; they may not be developmentally (cognitively, linguistically) ready for the kinds of responses they receive from teachers; they may not understand teachers' comments clearly enough to be able to take action on them..." (Casanave 87). When I first stumbled across this quotation during my readings, I immediately underlined it to make sure that I could go back to it for reference again. I have little practice grading the writing specifically of ESL students, but I have done my fair share of grading writing in general. In one instance, I had assigned creative short stories to freshmen. Some were as long as fifteen pages... an assigning mistake that I will never make again, to be sure. I remember sitting down to grade all of these papers, reading through each one, and writing down various comments as I saw fit. When the students got the papers back, they immediately flipped to the back page, the one containing the only thing they truly cared about written there: their grade. As I sat and watched this take place, I wondered if it would have mattered at all if I had written no comments at all on their papers. Do students actually use what teachers write on their papers to help them improve in future writing?
The example that I put forth relates to the final draft of the paper, but the same question could be asked about various drafts, as well. Based on the experience that I have had grading/editing/critiquing papers, I find the "error correction" debate in the writing of L2 writers extremely interesting as it truly transcends the L2 arena and moves into that of L1, as well. Ferris asserts that "error treatment is necessary for L2 writers," and, despite what happened with my comments from the short stories that I assigned, I am definitely in partial agreement with her (Casanave 89). During my own time spent in Spanish classes learning the language, my teacher would correct many of the errors on my papers, and I greatly appreciated her for this. Why would I want to continue to make the same mistake if one could tell me what I was doing wrong and help me correct it right then and there? Simply waiting to see if the students have learned enough and the "error" self-corrects itself is a chance that I would not have wanted to take with my own writing.
I do understand that correcting all of the "errors" on a student's page can be overwhelming for a student. Thus, I believe that teachers should focus on only two or three "bigger" "errors" in each student's paper. Our readings do point out that this may discourage students, and I completely understand just how this could happen. But we as teachers cannot not grade a test because a student may have got too many answers wrong; I'm sure that this could discourage them just as much. Instead, I believe that the marking of these errors should, when time allows, be paired with individual writing conferences so that the teacher can talk over these errors with the student, pointing out what they have done well in the process.
Ferris mentions the ethical dilemma that teachers face in whether or not to correct the students' grammar. Despite the fact that most students failed to look at my comments/corrections on their short stories, I would write the same amount that I wrote before in a heart beat. As a teacher, I would feel bad if I didn't make necessary comments to the students about particular parts of their papers. Sure, maybe they will eventually learn that information/skill as they become more fluent in a language/more skilled in writing, but isn't it our job as teachers to help student writers improve while they are in the four walls of our classrooms?
The example that I put forth relates to the final draft of the paper, but the same question could be asked about various drafts, as well. Based on the experience that I have had grading/editing/critiquing papers, I find the "error correction" debate in the writing of L2 writers extremely interesting as it truly transcends the L2 arena and moves into that of L1, as well. Ferris asserts that "error treatment is necessary for L2 writers," and, despite what happened with my comments from the short stories that I assigned, I am definitely in partial agreement with her (Casanave 89). During my own time spent in Spanish classes learning the language, my teacher would correct many of the errors on my papers, and I greatly appreciated her for this. Why would I want to continue to make the same mistake if one could tell me what I was doing wrong and help me correct it right then and there? Simply waiting to see if the students have learned enough and the "error" self-corrects itself is a chance that I would not have wanted to take with my own writing.
I do understand that correcting all of the "errors" on a student's page can be overwhelming for a student. Thus, I believe that teachers should focus on only two or three "bigger" "errors" in each student's paper. Our readings do point out that this may discourage students, and I completely understand just how this could happen. But we as teachers cannot not grade a test because a student may have got too many answers wrong; I'm sure that this could discourage them just as much. Instead, I believe that the marking of these errors should, when time allows, be paired with individual writing conferences so that the teacher can talk over these errors with the student, pointing out what they have done well in the process.
Ferris mentions the ethical dilemma that teachers face in whether or not to correct the students' grammar. Despite the fact that most students failed to look at my comments/corrections on their short stories, I would write the same amount that I wrote before in a heart beat. As a teacher, I would feel bad if I didn't make necessary comments to the students about particular parts of their papers. Sure, maybe they will eventually learn that information/skill as they become more fluent in a language/more skilled in writing, but isn't it our job as teachers to help student writers improve while they are in the four walls of our classrooms?
Monday, January 17, 2011
English 344: Tuesday, January 18th
As I begin writing this blog entry, I think back to my time student teaching. In one regular freshmen English class, I had seven ESL students, all of whom spoke Spanish as their L1 language. I had no experience working with these types of students before, and the Spanish that I speak is poor to say the least. They had very, very little experience in actual U.S. classrooms. Each student had only been in the country for a few years, and before their freshmen years in high school, had been in an ESL classroom to study the main subjects taught in school. Yet now, as they entered their first year in high school, the school administrators assumed that they could handle working side-by-side with the native speakers of English.
In our readings this week, Saville-Troike notes that how a second language is learned is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, and economic factors. All of the ESL students that I taught came from poorer backgrounds in which they never were able to build a good foundation for their first language, Spanish. Some had even been pulled in and out of school while living in Mexico, never getting a chance to feel the fluidity and connections made from continuous learning.
I believe that what I mentioned above is a critical issue for any person who is or on the path to become a secondary teacher in this country. How does one teach students a new language when their first language is extremely lacking? One unit that I taught all of the freshman was Romeo and Juliet. I will admit that Shakespeare is, at times, still hard for me to understand. I first began the unit with the accelerated students, and even they stumbled over the text time and again. As I began to teach the other students, exactly what I thought would happen did: The ESL students had absolutely no idea what was going on. I differentiated instruction the best I could in the classes, giving the ESL students much, much easier tasks. Still, I often wondered how best to teach students English literature and writing when they had so little knowledge about Spanish in the first place. The cross-linguistic transfer mentioned in today's reading could not possible be taking place.
I will be the first to admit that I know very little about teaching ESL students, but asking teachers to teach such students to read Shakespeare or understand complex Biology terms in English without first understanding their own language seems like an extremely daunting task to me. Saville-Troike once asks why there are such widely differentiated outcomes of SLA. This will be a question that will constantly arise as I continue through my education career. However, I know this much right now: Asking ESL students to perform tasks so far above their education level when they enter U.S. schools will only push them away from wanting to learn and leave them dropping out of school when they turn 15.
Some questions that I'd like to ponder:
- How should teachers go about teaching these ESL students who lack a sufficient base in their native language?
- What should school districts do to train teachers to better handle such students?
In our readings this week, Saville-Troike notes that how a second language is learned is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, and economic factors. All of the ESL students that I taught came from poorer backgrounds in which they never were able to build a good foundation for their first language, Spanish. Some had even been pulled in and out of school while living in Mexico, never getting a chance to feel the fluidity and connections made from continuous learning.
I believe that what I mentioned above is a critical issue for any person who is or on the path to become a secondary teacher in this country. How does one teach students a new language when their first language is extremely lacking? One unit that I taught all of the freshman was Romeo and Juliet. I will admit that Shakespeare is, at times, still hard for me to understand. I first began the unit with the accelerated students, and even they stumbled over the text time and again. As I began to teach the other students, exactly what I thought would happen did: The ESL students had absolutely no idea what was going on. I differentiated instruction the best I could in the classes, giving the ESL students much, much easier tasks. Still, I often wondered how best to teach students English literature and writing when they had so little knowledge about Spanish in the first place. The cross-linguistic transfer mentioned in today's reading could not possible be taking place.
I will be the first to admit that I know very little about teaching ESL students, but asking teachers to teach such students to read Shakespeare or understand complex Biology terms in English without first understanding their own language seems like an extremely daunting task to me. Saville-Troike once asks why there are such widely differentiated outcomes of SLA. This will be a question that will constantly arise as I continue through my education career. However, I know this much right now: Asking ESL students to perform tasks so far above their education level when they enter U.S. schools will only push them away from wanting to learn and leave them dropping out of school when they turn 15.
Some questions that I'd like to ponder:
- How should teachers go about teaching these ESL students who lack a sufficient base in their native language?
- What should school districts do to train teachers to better handle such students?
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
English 495: Thursday, January 13, 2011
I want to preface this post with the proclamation that this is my first-ever bog post. I'm not familiar with blog language, etc., but I'm assuming that I'll learn as I go!
This first blog is meant to be about how one became an L1/L2 writer. However, I am going to begin a bit differently and explain how I stopped becoming an L2 writer (or "writer" as I should say). My first experience with the Spanish language was in a middle school classroom when I was 12-years-old. I remember being extremely excited to learn a foreign language, often wondering what it would be like to be able to write and speak fluently in a new tongue. "People will think that I was soooo smart," my 7th grade self assumed.
That excitement quickly diminished as the semester passed by. Vocabulary list after vocabulary list to memorize, verb after verg to conjugate... where was the fun in that? I couldn't remember ever having to learn English in the way that I was being forced to learn Spanish, and no one then could explain to me that I was an L1 learner of English, a completely different animal, so to speak, from my status as an L2 in Spanish. Still, I continued on through four more years of the prerequisite foreign language classes and through an additional two even after that taken as an elective. In total, I had accomplished six years of Spanish when I graduated high school, something that should have been impressive but truly wasn't.
I figured that I couldn't be terrible at the language if I had taken that many years, so I decided to try to minor in Spanish when I began my undergraduate studies at U of I. "Maybe I could be some sort of bilingual reporter," my eighteen-year-old self thought as I once again found my excitement building for the foreign language. Surely, college classes would be exciting and quickly get me to my goal of becoming fluent in the language.
The first two that I took were great... but only because I was really good at them. I had tested out of the two beginning Spanish classes, and the third and fourth classes in the sequence were still highly driven by the testing of grammar... something my middle school and high school curriculum appeared to thrive on. Translating single sentences or even shorter paragraphs seemed a breeze to me.
However, trouble hit when I signed up for my third Spanish class, to be taken during the fall semester of my sophomore year. This class, titled "Written Spanish," was, unfortunately for me, entirely that. I remember coming to class the first day and sitting in front of a blank computer screen ("Since when do we use computers in Spanish class...?"). The teacher, now speaking entirely in the foreign language, told the class to write about various topics in Spanish using the word processors in front of us (at least that's what the girl sitting next to me told me that the professor said). I had always done well in school, but I was at a loss when asked to do this. I cannot even imagine what the sentences that I had managed to eek out actually translated into (I'm hopeful that it wasn't something inappropriate; that would have been my accident). I endured another day of the tortuous class, then did what I had never and would never do again during my undergraduate or graduate years: I dropped the class. I knew that I was doing horrible and would never make it there without massive work. Being only twenty-years-old also played a factor in this decision; I wanted to hang out and go out with my friends, not be stuck at home bonding with a Spanish-English dictionary every night. So, my dreams of becoming fluent in Spanish ended there.
Reflecting back on that class and on the article featuring success stories of various second language writers that we read for class today, I realize now that I was in what was called the "interlanguage" stage of learning Spanish. I was in that weird inbetween part where I did not really know how to communicate using the language, I just thought that I did. Yet, this reflection also makes me partly criticize the years of Spanish that I had had before I ever got to that college writing class. Rather than learning to write about my thoughts or other topics in coherent papers, I had only ever been drilled with grammar and maybe some paragraph translations. Very rarely had I ever been pushed to actually write about something in the language, and asking me to do so six years into my studies was a huge shock to my system.
I think that if this event would have come up in the present time, I would have handled the struggle differently. Rather than opting to quit, I would push through, work harder, and not be afraid to ask for help in my writing. Still, I do question the particular curriculum used in the Spanish classes that I took. What teaching methods and practice could have been different so that I would have gotten more out of my seven years of Spanish study than I did? How many other students across the United States face this same deficit when completing their high school studies in a foreign language?
My goal to become a fluent L2 writer is by no means dead. I have once again motivated myself to begin to relearn the language, knowing that it can only help me both personally and professionally. I have a deep love of the written word. From an early age, my parents encouraged me to write pages up on pages of stories (in English, of course). I majored in journalism in undergrad and then went on to work as a "professional writer" of sorts, a television news producer and reporter. Now, I simply need to transfer some of that love of writing in English into a love of writing in Spanish...I just can't quit this time.
This first blog is meant to be about how one became an L1/L2 writer. However, I am going to begin a bit differently and explain how I stopped becoming an L2 writer (or "writer" as I should say). My first experience with the Spanish language was in a middle school classroom when I was 12-years-old. I remember being extremely excited to learn a foreign language, often wondering what it would be like to be able to write and speak fluently in a new tongue. "People will think that I was soooo smart," my 7th grade self assumed.
That excitement quickly diminished as the semester passed by. Vocabulary list after vocabulary list to memorize, verb after verg to conjugate... where was the fun in that? I couldn't remember ever having to learn English in the way that I was being forced to learn Spanish, and no one then could explain to me that I was an L1 learner of English, a completely different animal, so to speak, from my status as an L2 in Spanish. Still, I continued on through four more years of the prerequisite foreign language classes and through an additional two even after that taken as an elective. In total, I had accomplished six years of Spanish when I graduated high school, something that should have been impressive but truly wasn't.
I figured that I couldn't be terrible at the language if I had taken that many years, so I decided to try to minor in Spanish when I began my undergraduate studies at U of I. "Maybe I could be some sort of bilingual reporter," my eighteen-year-old self thought as I once again found my excitement building for the foreign language. Surely, college classes would be exciting and quickly get me to my goal of becoming fluent in the language.
The first two that I took were great... but only because I was really good at them. I had tested out of the two beginning Spanish classes, and the third and fourth classes in the sequence were still highly driven by the testing of grammar... something my middle school and high school curriculum appeared to thrive on. Translating single sentences or even shorter paragraphs seemed a breeze to me.
However, trouble hit when I signed up for my third Spanish class, to be taken during the fall semester of my sophomore year. This class, titled "Written Spanish," was, unfortunately for me, entirely that. I remember coming to class the first day and sitting in front of a blank computer screen ("Since when do we use computers in Spanish class...?"). The teacher, now speaking entirely in the foreign language, told the class to write about various topics in Spanish using the word processors in front of us (at least that's what the girl sitting next to me told me that the professor said). I had always done well in school, but I was at a loss when asked to do this. I cannot even imagine what the sentences that I had managed to eek out actually translated into (I'm hopeful that it wasn't something inappropriate; that would have been my accident). I endured another day of the tortuous class, then did what I had never and would never do again during my undergraduate or graduate years: I dropped the class. I knew that I was doing horrible and would never make it there without massive work. Being only twenty-years-old also played a factor in this decision; I wanted to hang out and go out with my friends, not be stuck at home bonding with a Spanish-English dictionary every night. So, my dreams of becoming fluent in Spanish ended there.
Reflecting back on that class and on the article featuring success stories of various second language writers that we read for class today, I realize now that I was in what was called the "interlanguage" stage of learning Spanish. I was in that weird inbetween part where I did not really know how to communicate using the language, I just thought that I did. Yet, this reflection also makes me partly criticize the years of Spanish that I had had before I ever got to that college writing class. Rather than learning to write about my thoughts or other topics in coherent papers, I had only ever been drilled with grammar and maybe some paragraph translations. Very rarely had I ever been pushed to actually write about something in the language, and asking me to do so six years into my studies was a huge shock to my system.
I think that if this event would have come up in the present time, I would have handled the struggle differently. Rather than opting to quit, I would push through, work harder, and not be afraid to ask for help in my writing. Still, I do question the particular curriculum used in the Spanish classes that I took. What teaching methods and practice could have been different so that I would have gotten more out of my seven years of Spanish study than I did? How many other students across the United States face this same deficit when completing their high school studies in a foreign language?
My goal to become a fluent L2 writer is by no means dead. I have once again motivated myself to begin to relearn the language, knowing that it can only help me both personally and professionally. I have a deep love of the written word. From an early age, my parents encouraged me to write pages up on pages of stories (in English, of course). I majored in journalism in undergrad and then went on to work as a "professional writer" of sorts, a television news producer and reporter. Now, I simply need to transfer some of that love of writing in English into a love of writing in Spanish...I just can't quit this time.
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