Introduction to Language Learning Blog

 This week, we watched tons of video from different groups, and some were very professional! They got great editing, sound choice, and video content, which I deeply admired. For my own group, me and Ramon was the ones to make the video. And because we kind of start off late, we rushed the process and I feel like we could do better next time.

  In our second week, we start with the review part, where we went over the things we talked about last time. And then, it’s the evaluation time! We have the groups compete with each other and the winners would get candies! The first competition was Kahoot, in which we put vocabs, phrases and interesting trivia knowledge about the Spanish culture. As we went on with the games, we noticed that the time limit for each question was a little bit too short, and some students didn’t quite have enough time to solve them. That’s something we should watch out on next time. But overall the Kahoot activity went well.   Then, the second activity is about training students to speak and listen well. One part is to let students finish sentences that we give out. Another part is to let students find mistakes in a sentence. Then, after the activity is done, we give out our rewards to the winners! And long story short, it pretty well!   From the other groups, we learn further knowl...

  In both weeks of our teaching, my job in this group is to take photos and videos for the video project. And in this journal, I would like to give my reflections on others and our activities in week 1.   The first language that we learned is German, and it was pretty fun! We learned numbers and other daily life words. Like the ones you would use in a baker store. The second language that we learned is Korean, and this was really fun as well. I think that one thing that the group did really well is teaching with repetition, and even though we learned relatively small categories of words, but with repetition, I felt like we really grasped the words that were taught to us, like directional words and words and sentences that help with introducing ourselves.   For our own group, we taught conversations that would happen in everyday life. To be particular, we essentially taught a dialogue that included self-introduction and buying things. And after teaching, we let s...

   Hello, today, I am going to give some impressions and review to the speech that our language learning class heard last class. So the speaker is someone who knew tons of language, including Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, English, lots of European language etc. And he first talked about how he was able to learn English super well through playing an online multiplayer game. I agreed on what he said deeply, but still have some doubts on my own. As for why I agree with him, from my previous entries, I'm sure that you know that I am also someone who learned a whole lot from playing video games when I was small, and he explaining how he got good with the language was somewhat understandable. However, he also claimed that he "mastered" the language and the language thus became easy for him. That's the part I felt like it's a bit hard to believe. Sure, a video game can possibly provide a decent English environment for its player, but it can be severely not enough fo...

  Journal Entry 5   Welcome to this week’s journal. Today I would like to talk about something a little different, my major in college. So, as you could probably guess, I major in the department of English. For our courses, the majority of them are regarding linguistics, writing, oral training and English literature. And I actually didn’t intend to go to this department in the first place when I was deciding what to study in college. At first, I wanted to study business, but as things didn’t exactly go my way, I then decided to go to NCCU(a rather good business school)’s Department of English, and planned on also majoring in business if things allowed me to do so.      So knowing this, I was taking business courses (economics and accounting) while taking my major’s courses upon entering college. And from my freshmen year, I felt like English majors are definitely at a disadvantage compared to students studying business. Their courses are more oriented towar...

   Well hello again, very pleased that you are tagging along with my little journey of language learning. Today, I would like to share my experiences in the class of “Introduction to Language Learning.”   For starters, what I like most of this class is that there are tons of fun opportunities for students to interact with each other, even when the class size is quite large. In other lessons that I’ve taken in NCCU, the majority of classes either have no social activities or only have activities that ask students to solve problems, and then come up with solutions. The latter one is fun and alright, but can sometimes be quite frustrating when you just don’t have the right idea at the given moment or maybe you are just not engaged in the topic at all. In this course, however, the activities are very engaging, like the jigsaw activity we did the other day, or the game in which we have to come up with vague solutions to our planets’ problem and have to let other groups gu...