See learning plan template, but enhance and elaborate, as needed. What kind of learner are you? How do you study effectively? What tasks and goals are most important to you?
In addition to posting your learning plan to the Ning, provide brief commentary describing how you have organized your self-directed learning plan. What have you learned so far? Have you identified resources and textbooks to promote your task-based objectives? How will your studies allow you investigate your target language and culture more deeply? What first prompted your interest, and motivated you to start learning? What feedback have you received from your classmates? Dr. Marsh-Soloway will provide written feedback.
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I'm an auditory and visual and kinetic learner (mostly auditory) and I study effectively by testing myself constantly and using repetition and talking to myself and acting as if I'm teaching a lecture and doing a presentation. I role play scenarios and play all characters and try to make it realistic and thus get experience speaking from all points of view.
Writing a daily diary and expanding my vocabulary is important tasks for me and learning grammar and sentence structures are also important skills for me to learn. It is my goal to master writing and listening better, since my speaking skills are the best skill out of the language set of learning. My ultimate goal is to master Korean, but a more specific goal that I set for myself is be able to email and write official documents in Korean correctly and understand official documents as well. I have organized my learning plan to semester long goals and setting up steps for that. Then I set up weekly goals and then daily goals and then get assessments weekly by my tutor and then set up monthly assessments.
For my daily goals, I will write in a dedicated Korean only diary daily, and practice my weekly vocabulary daily. Weekly, I will meet with my tutor, watch a movie or short video and try comprehend it and make a reflection paper on it and turn it in for editing for my tutor and also turn in my diary to my tutor weekly to get it edited and practice the parts I got incorrect. Then I will do a biweekly comprehension and writing and speaking assessment with my tutor and focus on honing in on the parts I got incorrect. I have learned that there are a lot of resources and some apps that are helpful such as memrise, the app called Eggbun, which allows you to practice hearing, speaking and text Korean and also learn new vocabulary and verbs, and the website NAVER which is the Korean version of Google and Youtube and Netflix are also good tools for listening to movies in Korean and having English subtitles. I’m a little hesitant and reluctant to get a textbook for Korean because of the tendency to be dry and not very engaging and the mindset they have of learning new words and vocabulary constantly. But yes, these resources will enable me to actively learn Korean. My learning plan will allow me to dive in deeper rather than surface level due to the fact that it’s tailored to what I need and what I am weak in so instead of wasting time in what I already excel at or am relatively proficient in, but target practice what I struggle in, which is spelling and grammar and learning idioms and collocations.
I was motivated to learn by wanting to have mastery over my heritage language and learning more about my culture. And wanting to connect with my family in Korean. I was motivated when I realized I couldn’t talk in depth about topics such as government and academics and political debates and recent news with my parents.
I have yet to receive any feedback from classmates, but hope that it will be constructive and supportive to my learning.
Over the years, I have learned how I am very much a visual and an auditory learner. I've also learned that I study most effectively through making notecards, watching lectures on materials, and allowing enough time for repetition. I was inspired to learn about ASL through interacting with a guest at my job at Chick-fil-A. It was soon after then that I learned about how there is a significant deaf community in Richmond, and I wanted to be able to communicate with them.
Due to this, I've organized my self-directed learning plan to mostly consist of videos, gifs, and much interaction with either other people learning ASL or directly trying to communicate with individuals who sign ASL and are deaf/hard of hearing. In addition to common resources many people refer to when learning ASL (LifePrint, SignSchool) I've found YouTubers such as SignDuo and Our Signed World to be incredibly helpful as they are the channels made from individuals who are deaf. Another resource that I recently learned about is Deaf Family Matters on Instagram. This page has not only allowed me to learn more about deaf culture, but has taught me about some ableism and discriminations that deaf citizens face. It has also has exposed me to new terms that I would most likely not cover in a "traditional" ASL class.