Week 3 Reflection
Now a handful of weeks into class, we have gotten a structure up and running for sure. Making the syllabus and planning out class content was more challenging than I anticipated. I thought it would be something I could do without following a textbook, but it was such a relief from the director side of this class experience to progress through the logical steps and vocabulary lists that someone else has already planned and thought out with much more care than I would have been able to. From the other side, the student side, I had been against using a book because I had found them dull and had always questioned how effective they were in any classroom, not even just a language learning setting, as the majority of students will not read them, or if they do, will not read them closely and effectively. Since I am now wearing both hats, I have a better understanding of why many teachers use books as a guide. I am sure it saves them many headaches and late hours.
Our goal these weeks has been to get a final syllabus. I also had to find time to photocopy the pages we wanted as it would be much easier to send her a PDF than to have her try and somehow get the book down there, so we had to look at what chapters and what pages we wanted to focus on. As I had used this book before in Prof. Abreu’s class, I had seen a bit of it before, but, as I had mentioned, he also worked hard to incorporate a dynamic element into every class so we would look at the book every now and then but it was not as central as an element to that class as we are thinking it will be to our class. I wanted to be sure to include the vocab list from every chapter so that I could learn about 60 words a week, but other than that I included a brief overview of about ten chapters that we could go through in the following weeks at our own pace. I was sure to include sections about grammatical concepts that were more difficult or that I knew I struggle with.
I test how well I have learned and really retained these words, concepts and am advancing in my language journey through a variety of ways. Primarily, I implement them all, or as many as I can, in our Tuesday meetings where we fill the entire time with speaking and listening skills. It was shaky at first, but I have been able to progress to a more conversational, fluid pace and I get better, or more “fluent-sounding”, each week. As a linguistics student, I know that oftentimes the terminology used to refer to the bilingual process can be questionable, such as the concept of an “incomplete” bilingual or an inherent notion that every person and learner should always aim to achieve monolingual fluency in a target language when the measure of a complete monolingual is not precisely defined and is such a high bar that it discourages many people from even trying. In this case, however, my goal is to advance as much as I can and get the tools that I would need to be as comfortable as possible talking with and leading speakers with a definite dominance over my target language.
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