My family is from Bangladesh but I grew up in the United States. As a child, my parents always spoke to me only in Bengali because they wanted me to be fluent in Bengali. My parents believed that I would be able to learn English on my own through conversations with my friends, television, and especially in school. Therefore I simultaneously learned English and Bengali when I was growing up. Before I started kindergarten, my mom started teaching me how to read and write in both English and Bengali; and at this point because I was already conversational in Bengali and was comfortable speaking the language, we would also started using English at home. Once I started elementary school, I primary learned English through my schoolwork and I learned Bengali at home.
In middle school, my family moved back to Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, I took Bengali and English classes at school, and that’s how I learned most of the grammar in Bengali. Even though I was learning two languages, and obviously had my own learning style, because I have always been fluent in both Bengali and English, I never really thought of either as having to learn a new language. In high school, I had to take Spanish classes to fulfill my second language requirement (we had moved back to the States at this point). I have very basic Spanish language knowledge from two years of high school Spanish classes. And I think learning Spanish at a later stage in my life helped me to better understand how I learn languages and what kind of language learning activities I like and are effective for me.
I really enjoy reading in my target language. I like reading out loud — this helps me picture what I am reading and contextualize the scene from the book. Even when I am simply learning new words and trying to expand my vocabulary, I like putting the words in sentences and try to come up with a storyline that I can say aloud and remember the proper use of the word.
According to the surveys I took, I am an auditory learner. This makes sense because I always have to say things out loud, or repeat new information over and over again in my head, to remember things better. When learning languages, I also like conversations with a native speaker. I prefer to talk through any obstacles I might be facing. Instead of reading about the right use of words or grammar, I prefer someone explaining why certain grammar rules apply. By the end of this semester I want to be able to have basic conversational knowledge of Korean (even if I don’t know the proper grammar). In order to expand my learning activities, I should start having more conversations with my language partner, or a native speaker, and stop focusing on perfecting my grammar. I also believe I will also benefit from just watching videos in Korean since hearing conversations has always helped me to more easily understand and learn a language.
Comments
Fantastic post, Tanjila! They say that individuals who are exposed to multiple languages at an early age very often develop into auditory learners. Later on in the course, we'll watch a fascinating study by Janet Werker detailing how even at the young age of 2-3, children tend to undergo fossilization, which contributes to an inability not only to produce sounds outside their linguistic environment, but even to discriminate acoustically between different phonological segments.
Reading aloud is a fantastic exercise because it allows you to practice reading and speaking simultaneously. This also helps with questions of articulatory phonetics. Starting out, you may want to ask your language partner to record a short prepared script in Korean. Without listening to it, record your own rendition of the same script and then compare. Compare the two recordings, and make adjustments to try to mimic the speech of a native speaker as closely as possible. Your emphasis on conversation knowledge, i.e. meaning over grammar and usage- makes perfects sense, and coincides with the overarching tenets of the communicative approach. Good luck!