Discussion Post #7

[Felicitas G. Heinzel]

At the time of the recording I was very broad about my goals and strategies. I have since become more specific in defining my objectives for each week, as well as for the entire semester. This has helped me to more accurately track my progress and to be better at assisting my language learning out of class. Overall, I have incorporated the general goals and strategies from my original learning plan to improve the quality of my learning plan and my learning itself. The insights and experiences other people have shared during our class discussions have helped me a lot to have a better view on how to best learn a language and it has helped me to develop new strategies myself. The material covered in class itself is helpful as a foundation of language, but it has not directly furthered my learning yet. Especially because I am not very far in learning the target language, I have not been able to incorporate a lot of the materials covered in class. So far, in my tutor sessions, we have not talked about a lot of cultural aspects of Korean, so I have not been able to draw a lot of connections between culture and language. Regardless of this, I am aware of the incredibly important combination of language and culture and will ask more questions in order to understand this link. This will help me to understand the structure of the language better, as well as learning concepts and vocabulary necessary to be culturally competent when visiting the country. I am currently in the process of learning more about grammatical competence in Korean and am slowly also moving toward discourse competence. These are fundamental in learning sentence structures and being able to have a coherent conversation. In addition to this, I am emphasizing sociolinguistic competence, however, I am still lacking some of the basics I need to properly learn about and execute this competence. I have added learning more about these competencies as goals in my learning plan.