While I am currently not learning Turkish, the discussion posed in class about each individual’s learning plans illuminated some of the aspects of my own learning plan that may not work very well in practice. Many students mentioned how parceling out specific times for specific activities can be detrimental to the flow of a conversation or learning opportunity. I do not do this in my learning plan, but I do limit my learning to specific topics, with a new topic being introduced along a regular time frame. I feel that in order to create a more organic discussion-based learning opportunity (especially when learning with a language-learning mentor), these topics can act more as guidelines or preparation for a discussion. For example, if I prepare by learning vocabulary on a certain topic, it is very likely I will want to speak about that topic. However, if the conversation is naturally steered into another direction, this discussion is still very useful to my pursuit of Turkish. Another thing I learned from current Turkish language learners is that their language-learning mentor allows them to make mistakes, and then, instead of correcting them, tries to have them identify and fix those mistakes. While I am unable to make a claim about Turkish culture in general (it is dangerous to make one person representative of a whole culture), it seems this may be evidence that the language-learning mentor (Mervé ?) places some value in independence (allowing one to solve his/her own problems).
It seems possible—and potentially harmful towards later language learning—that the main aspect of communicative competence that I will be learning is only linguistic competence. While this will provide some benefit in that I know vocabulary and methods of connecting that vocabulary into sentences and phrases, this will not be enough to provide me with communicative competence, as I am missing out on the sociolinguistic, strategic, and discourse competences that are encompassed within communicative competence. While to a small extent, language can be separated from culture (as seen by someone exhibiting purely linguistic competence), obviously one cannot communicate effectively without some cultural knowledge as well (whether this be idioms, patterns of speech, or even when to speak or tone of voice). Luckily, my learning plan seems to deal a little bit with these other aspects of communicative competence, including strategic competence, as I aim to reduce any communication breakdown errors by learning how to ask what certain words mean as well as how to say a certain word in the target language. While I will be addressing discourse competence by speaking weekly with a language mentor, I feel I should add a writing aspect to my learning plan so that I become more comfortable portraying coherent thoughts both orally and through writing. Sociolinguistic competence seems the most challenging of all the competences, and I feel I will only gradually learn this by asking questions of my language learning mentor as well as observing her own speaking interactions with others. Of course, the best way to gain sociolinguistic competence (as well as communicative competence in general) would probably be to go abroad.
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