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.
No comments:
Post a Comment