Go back and watch the recording of your presentation of your learning plan on the class PanOpto collection on Blackboard. Comment briefly on how things are going. What has changed? How have you incorporated materials and insights from class into your efforts? Have discussions regarding language structures and learning strategies helped you to understand the target language and culture? If so, how?
Reflect on your language learning so far. How would you describe the relationship between language and culture? What do you need to do to improve your communicative competence? Based on the reading by H.D. Brown, what kinds of competence are emphasized in your plan?
Replies
I have incorporated and implemented most of my learning plans to what I am doing now. I am doing weekly vocabulary based on my daily diary entry corrections and grammar corrections as well to sentence structure. I do my daily diary and get it corrected too and I alternate between handwriting and typing to get familiar with both as much as possible. I haven't been able to read books quite just yet, but we watch weekly Korean shows with subtitles in English and we discuss what happened in Korean and write reflections in Korean as a response. So this will be kind of like the translation from Korean to English to Korean (watching the show, and then coming up with a response back into Korean from my own thoughts). I have learned more cultural aspects from my tutor teaching me about the Korean national anthem and also the Korean National Independence day, (March 1st) and the history of it and the revolution. So besides the reading portion of my learning plan, everything else is going according to plan. SDLC also incorporates learning the history of my language that I'm learning and also the basics of articulation and sounds. I'm learning about the language structure with SDLC and learning that I'm changing strategies in learning the structure of grammar, morphology and phonemes from it. I've learned that there is more to syntax than the laymen's term implies and that there is different sects in it such as morphology and morphemes and it has to do with meaning that can stand by itself, independently and that it's more sentence structure or broken down even further, which is more of what I'm focusing on, instead of phonemes and diction and vocabulary.
I would say that my experience so far has been eye-opening and that it's difficult to keep it going and do the daily tasks and keep up with the studying and it can be frustrating when you stumble or don't get it the first couple of times and keep making the same mistakes. But so far it's been very fruitful and rewarding to see my writing getting better. My comprehension is already pretty high so I've been focusing on my writing and spelling. The culture greatly affected the language creation itself, as it was created by scholars and the King Sejong himself and a lot of influence of other cultures to Korea affected the language and the vocabulary. For example, the word "jacket" doesn't really exist, so the Korean-ized version of the word "jumper" is used instead. There are other words like that are prolific in the culture, where there is an adoption of things from other cultures and then Korean puts its own spin on it and makes it its own. I think I need to try communicate through texts more and get comfortable typing both on the phone and the computer instead of free handwriting, although I need practice with that as well. Grammatical competence and textual competence are highly emphasized in my learning plan, specifically, morphology and syntax.