- Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language. What do you need to improve your communicative competence?
I have had quite an interesting learning experience so far. My country borders Turkey and my region and the city are very close to the border. I discovered so many Turkish words and expressions that are used in my dialect as well. Most of those are not part of the written Armenian language but are still used in my dialect. I tried to figure out whether those words and expressions are originally Armenian or Turkish and it was an interesting linguistic experience.
I have also been reading about lots of Turkish cities, archeological sites, cultural habits, specific Turkish expressions etc. Understanding the culture has greatly helped me in understanding the language overall. I know the major cities in Turkey, I am familiar with some of the cultural differences between the East and the West. My language partner has helped me and my classmates in understanding the Turkish culture very well.
I have started to do some auditory practice to make sure I am pronouncing the words I learn correctly. I also started to watch Turkish TV series with Russian subtitles. Each episode is more than 2 hours long and it helps me hear the sounds of the language, everyday conversations and expressions, etc. The TV series is also helping me see small cultural features of the country, some of which are the same with my own country.
My target language uses latin alphabet except for a few unique letters, so reading is very easy for me. I'm also able to pronounce all the sounds properly because of being familiar with those from other languages.
In the assigned readings, I read about grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic competences and understood the role of social contexts, grammatical aspects, sentence connections, sociocultural rules in forming an effective communication.I also learnt about organizational and pragmatic competences and read more about the role of strategic competence. I found the 7 functions of languages very interesting especially when it came to regulatory and heuristic functions.It was a little odd to read about the rules of the conversations, since I thought conversations just happen without the necessity of creating rules and structures. I also loved seeing small sections about proxemics and kinesics in the reading and I went to some additional reading materials and asked question to my language partner to learn more about these features in Turkey.
I believe my communication competence is in a good shape and that is because my target language and culture have similarities with my own culture, so we have a similar sense of kinesics, proxemics, etc. We share some of the same body language with the Turkish people, so I am familiar with those as well. I need to improve my use of morphology and syntax in order to understand the language better, however communication competence has always been something that I thought comes from within a person without a specific effort to succeed at it, so reading the material gave me a food for thought about the mentioned terms and concepts.
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