For our first meeting of the semester, my language study partner and I decided to just do a review of my language ability and create a new learning plan. We both agreed that I have definitely shown improvement in my comprehension of the Vietnamese language. This is likely due to the fact that over the summer, I had the opportunity to be able to work alongside many Vietnamese exchange students as well as the older Vietnamese population in my community. My hometown in Falls Church, Northern Virginia has a dense Vietnamese population that was the result of mass immigration during the Vietnam War era.
As many of the older people in my community generally do not have good grasp of the English language, I suddenly found myself forced into a situation where I must use Vietnamese to communicate with other people. Initially, I found the interactions to be extremely awkward, mostly because of the fact that I normally do not use Vietnamese to interact outside of my home (or in a classroom setting) and I was mixing up or just straight up forget a lot of words – or, more often than not, mix English and Vietnamese. However, the people were genuinely nice about my terrible awkwardness and some even offered to help me practice once they realized that I was trying to relearn the language. Due to the fact that the community is made of Vietnam War refugees, my community is comprised of mostly Southern Vietnamese accent speakers. As time went on, I was more comfortable with my speaking skill and I found most conversations I hold with people tend to flow quite smoothly.
My language partner pointed out that while I will probably need some more practice with speaking, I should not make it a high priority like I did last semester. Instead, he suggested that I focus on other things like critical reading and writing, which I wholeheartedly agreed. While my speaking and listening, skill have greatly improved in the last couple months, my reading skills are still elementary at best (considering that is where I left off anyway) and my writings is full of grammatical and spelling mistakes. So, we agreed that I should focus on improving my reading and writing skills this semester. To do that, I will start by reading middle school level literature and then write short summaries on the readings, which will then be checked for mistakes by my partner. This will help improve not only my basic reading and writing skills, but it will also allow me to articulate meanings in Vietnamese and help improve my critical reading skills.
Finally, we also compiled a list of activities that we could explore to help further develop my skills:
- Listening to music then write summaries & questions --> listening comprehension & writing
- Reading news articles then write summaries & questions --> reading comprehension & writing
- Dictation tests (weekly or monthly) --> listening & writing (spelling & grammar)
- Watching television programs then answer questions --> listening comprehension
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