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 readings by H.D. Brown, what kinds of competence are emphasized in your plan?
Read “Communicative Competence,” pp. 218-243 from Principles of Language Learning and Teaching by H.D. Brown
Replies
Since the making of my presentation, my language learning plan has been mainly focusing on three out of four objectives: K dramas, the use of language partners, and talking with family. I would say that I definitely have made progress on my conversational skills thanks to the more frequent use of Korean. Although I am still interested in making a Korean song as an assessment, I believe my learning priorities have shifted due to a few reasons. One reason is that I had hernia repair surgery before the semester started and that has deterred me from singing as much I want to due to chronic pain. Another reason is that I plan to be able to talk and listen well as I plan to study abroad in my junior year.
I think the class has helped me look more intentional towards the language of Korean itself while intertwining culture into it as well. It made me understand the impact the Korean language and culture has left me while I lived in Korea. As I read "Communicative Competence", I believe that my sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence are being emphasized by my language learning plan. All thanks to the more frequent usage of Korean and the exposition of Korean culture through mediums like K-dramas.
I think that I have made a lot of progress since I first gave my presentation! My language partner, Reba, has her own lesson plan that has been great. We mostly follow the progression of the book and she introduces additional signs that the book doesn’t discuss on a particular subject. With this structure, at the end of each lesson, I am given pages to read to prepare me for the next lesson. When looking back at my lesson plan and the goals I had for each month, I realized that Reba’s progression actually ended up being very similar to what I had envisioned when I made my learning plan! Reba also allows time towards the end of our lessons to allow me to ask her any questions that I may have. These questions could be in relation to our lesson from that day or any particular words that I wanted to learn the sign for. I have also really enjoyed how Reba and I will make up stories together. She will tell me a story, and then I tell her one. This has been great practice and has helped my confidence when signing!
What also remained consistent from my initial plan is how I’ve been watching videos of Deaf YouTubers. This has helped me not only expand my vocabulary, but also become more aware of Deaf culture and how signs used can really differ depending on location! For example, I learned how there are so many different ways that the Deaf community signs quarantine! The ASL Dictionary portion of the website Handspeak has different ways to sign quarantine. I noticed that this really differed the sign that Sign Duo used in their YouTube video. I finally just asked Reba what she uses to sign quarantine, and she uses the sign that is the same as “isolation”.
One thing that I haven’t done yet that I really need to proceed with is doing a weekly or daily vlog that talks about what I did that day/week. I think that this will help me because it will give me more conversational practice (thus, hopefully improving my communicative competence) as well as can serve as a gauge of how I have improved in ASL over time. I also still am struggling with understanding ASL images and really rely on ASL gifs. I am hoping to improve more on these so that I could eventually be able to purchase ASL flash cards and understand what they mean.
Based on this reading, I would say that my plan and Reba's plan both emphasize communicative competence, grammatical competence, textual competence, and strategic competence. Last Friday, it seemed as though Reba was trying to help me build my strategic competence by encouraging me to guess the sign of a word based on background knowledge of the handshape and how an individual would normally act out that particular word. Sociolinguistic competence has also been increasingly addressed as I learn more about sign language "accents" and how certain signs are used as opposed to others depending on the regional area. I have seen over the past few weeks how some of the "textbook" examples of signs may or may not be used depending on the region. Knowing this, I would say that culture really does have a huge impact on language.
After watching my originally learning plans my language goals have definitely been altered. Since I have decided to study abroad my focus changed to mainly speaking based. While I am still practicing my writing skills to text to my Korean friends, my goals have changed towards improving the flow of my conversations. I have been using this SDLC class to practice my Korean speaking skills with my language partner, Janette. In terms of materials, I added the Learn Korean with BTS as well as a number of really good apps, like Eggbun and Lingodeer. The Talk to me in Korean workbooks have become a staple in my lessons.
This class has definitely helped define my goals and the key areas that I need to work on. I have learned how deeply intertwined language and culture to the point where it can completely change our view of the world. As we mentioned in class the more languages you expose yourself to the more culturally aware you become. I often think that with each language I speak my personality drastically changes, most likely from code-switching, From the reading, I found that grammatical competence is my weakest area especially Discourse competence. Discourse competence has been harder for me to master since I keep forgetting to use the 하고 verb in my sentence to improve sentence connection. I have sociolinguistic competency because I had stayed in Korea and learned from native speakers, but now mainly from Korean television. But not having my sentence flow is what prevents me from sounding like a native speaker.
Since I made this video, my learning language schedule has changed quite a bit! We now only meet 3 days out of the week, while the other days are self-learning days. During those days we reflect in Bahasa Indonesia on an aspect of Indonesian culture in our weekly cultural journals. This is very helpful for learning the language in the context of different unique aspects of Indonesian culture. I still have my dictionary of Indonesian words, but I find that I have to rely on it less and less as I use the words more regularly. My speech in the language is improving from our weekly staged monologues and dialogues. Sometimes these imitate a potential scenario (like ordering at a restaurant) or we simply discuss a new concept like our favorite animals. These conversations really help me to use the language more organically and in relevant scenarios. Although they are still staged, I have noticed an improvement over the last few weeks with my fluency has increased (from 6-7 sentences to 11ish sentences per 2 minutes). This is especially encouraging because these conversations are very similar to actual organic conversations that I could have in Indonesia, since they incorporate prevalent aspects of the culture: religion, food, a day’s activity, etc.
As predicted, my lack of auditory learning skills is quite an impediment in my learning of Bahasa Indonesia. Sometimes it seems like when I hear the language, it is utter gibberish! I find this very frustrating, although it is gradually improving. Especially with the previously mentioned conversations.
My learning plan certainly emphasizes gaining more of a cultural/sociolinguistic competency by incorporating a lot of the unique culture of Indonesia into the activities, and I am striving for interpersonal communication skills, but I find that the writing and reading skills come much easier to me than the speaking and listening. In terms of writing, I find myself able to express most of my ideas now, with the occasional assistance of google translate. When we read Indonesian in class, I am able to comprehend the majority of the paragraphs, albeit with a few questions of specific words. However, if the same paragraph were played out loud without accompanying text, I can almost confidently say that I would not understand the majority of it. In Kefalonia, Greek, they have a slang saying “σιγά-σιγά”, meaning slowly, slowly. This is how I make sure to have patience with myself when it comes to auditory skills in a language. Sometimes I just have to prepare myself as best as possible before immersing myself in the language, which is how I’ll actually get the sounds to stick permanently.