I am so proud of how far Leticia and I have come. It has been an insane semester for both of us. Leticia, who has acclimated to living and learning at a US school and has been ever so patient with me, having never attempted to speak Portuguese until this past summer.
Together, we have both stopped to take a breath and teach each other how best to learn Portuguese. I have watched her seize the role of educator, creating our weekly schedule and researching a textbook and creating assignments in it for me. She also has insane amounts of patience and is willing to be silly. Just last week, our lesson took a weird turn as we discussed the concept of “black eyes” in Portuguese and the short hand of saying someone has “a blue eye” instead of blue eyes. We were both in tears we were laughing so hard over saying to someone in English that you liked their blue eye, which would be totally normal to say in Portuguese. It is finding out little gems like this that have gotten me through some of the more overwhelming parts of tackling a language that I am so unfamiliar with. I look to Leticia as a role model in this. She has truly immersed herself in English and I look to her for inspiration that I can learn a language while still in my home country with all my comforts.
However, to be less sentimental: these are my overall thoughts and reflections regarding my semester of language learning through the Self-Directed Language Program.
I believe that initially Leticia and I were both overwhelmed and I was worried I should have taken the time to first take the intro course to have a better idea of how I wanted to structure the Portuguese course. However, looking back I have no regrets because I believe both of us jumping in was helpful in pushing us to work out the kinks as we were experiencing them. We progressed from having a central notebook in which I took notes and she wrote down key vocabulary. Then, we created the topic schedule for each of our meetings. Now, we also have the additional resource of a textbook. I think that these are all key components to have when both people involved in the SDLC match-up do not have experience with SDLC and, in my case, do not have experience with the language. All three of the resources I have mentioned above were crucial to creating the structured class I needed as a beginner in the language. Leticia introduced these resources because they were also helpful to her as an educator. She was dealing with a brunt of the work in having to come up with examples and vocabulary on the fly at first. She brought in the textbook and website resources (through the schedule) to provide more of that vocabulary in advance. The schedule gave her more time to come up with those examples. She took my learning plan and assigned dates to it, so that she could prepare before each of the dates and also so that I could prepare any questions I had as well.
However, where I think we could continue to improve is that we need to converse in Portuguese more during our courses rather than reading Portuguese from a text. Reading sentences aloud is helpful to better my pronunciation (which always needs the help); however, it does not require any critical thinking. I think that we need to be incorporating more activities like the maps and family trees we drew (during midsemester) so that we can use our vocabulary in conversation. I also think that I could improve upon, or at least something that I have not figured out yet, is if I should be keeping notes. Language is something that is so mentally driven, I usually end our courses with a bunch of random words, letters, and phrases scrawled on my paper in both Leticia and I’s handwriting. I am definitely absorbing some of the skills and vocabulary reflected in these writings, but not everything. I think that something I wish I had done more of throughout the semester is had notes that I would be able to reference when something comes up that I know we have gone over, but I cannot remember.
Overall, however, I think that the program has largely been successful for both of us. The flexible nature of meet up times and settings was incredibly helpful when both of us had busy times during the semester. It feels like any place on campus has served as our classroom, which is kind of beautiful to me because all we really needed were the two of us.
Comments
I love how you and Leticia moved from apprehension about taking the intro SLDC 105 course in conjunction with SDLC110 (as opposed to sequentially) to the excitement for a new challenge. I feel like SLDC might not have been as interesting if you were not able to actively apply what you were learning to a target language, and maybe having questions you could not answer and/or identify in the beginning made answering them more satisfying near the end of the semester.