Learning Chinese-Personal Narrative
In 1995, I decided to volunteer as a missionary for my church. On the application form, there was no space for suggestions as to where in the world I would like to serve as a missionary. Church leaders assign missionaries to the place they feel we should go. I was surprised with the assignment to serve in Taiwan, speaking Mandarin Chinese. I had no previous experience with Chinese people or their language, so I felt fortunate that the church provides 2 months of intensive language training before the missionary even gets on the plane. During my 2 months in the language-training center, I found out just how different Mandarin Chinese is from my native language. The time went by quickly, and after obtaining a very tenuous grasp on the basics of Mandarin, I got on the plane and flew to Taiwan. Upon arriving there, I was assigned a companion who had been in Taiwan for just over a year and a half. From my first day in Taiwan, I was expected to dive headfirst into the task of teaching people about the church. I found that although at the Missionary Training Center I had learned to put together basic sentences, there was a whole other level of the language that I still needed to consider—the discourse level. The pursuit of clear and fluent discourse has been a focus of mine ever since. I always hoped that I would eventually "pick up" the finer points of Mandarin Chinese purely through contact with the people. The church did provide us with some study aids. However, these study aids amounted only to vocabulary lists and a few grammar hints which were either very basic or not altogether accurate. I discovered a trend, which has been accurately pointed out by Bourgerie (1997:107...
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...set of rules to govern the use of this particle may be impossible. It may be beneficial to keep in mind that of the treatments of this particle analyzed in this paper, all of them covered PRV-le on mostly a sentence by sentence level. I believe that if there is a possibility of completely breaking down this principle into parts easily digested by a learner of Chinese, it lies in considering this particle on a discourse level of speech. Until the time that this avenue is adequately explored, it seems the best way for a learner of Chinese to "pick up" the correct use of this particle is to understand the rules given (at least those given by Li and Thompson). These rules don't necessarily have to be an absolute dictator of how PRV-le must be used, but following those rules will most likely bring a Chinese learner 80% accuracy in using this particle correctly.
My parents had great influence on my learning of language. They were both born and grown up in Liaoning Province but not Tianjin (respectively in Dalian countryside and Yingkou countryside). After the graduation of local high schools they went to Harbin for college which also belongs to Northeast China. Throughout their first 22 years my parents spoke very rural “东北话” (Northeast dialect) according to my interviews. Until they were distributed to work in Tianjin, chances appeared to become government officers. D...
I was born and raised in Vietnam, so I naturally observed my culture from my family and my previous schools. I learned most of my culture by watching and coping the ways my family do things. My family and my friends all spoke Vietnamese, so I eventually knew how to speak and understand deeply about my language as I grew up. At home, my mom cooked many Vietnamese foods, and she also taught me to cook Vietnamese food. So I became accustom Vietnamese food. I also learned that grandparents and parents in my culture are taken care of until they die. At school, I learned to address people formally and greet higher-ranking people first. In Vietnamese culture, ranking and status are not related to wealth, so they are concerned with age and education.
As the dull scent of chalk dust mixes imperceptably with the drone of the teacher's monotone, I doodle in my tablet to stay awake. I notice vaguely that, despite my best efforts in the shower this morning after practice, I still smell like chlorine. I sigh and wonder why the school's administration requires the students to take a class that, if it were on the Internet, would delight Mirsky (creator of Mirsky's Worst of the Web), as yet another addition to his list of worthless sites. Still, there was hope that I would learn something that would make today's first class more than just forty-five wasted minutes... It wouldn't be the first time I learned something new from the least likely place.
Personal narratives allow you to share your life with others and vicariously experience the things that happen around you. Your job as a writer is to put the reader in the midst of the action letting him or her live through an experience. Although a great deal of writing has a thesis, stories are different. A good story creates a dramatic effect, makes us laugh, gives us pleasurable fright, and/or gets us on the edge of our seats. A story has done its job if we can say, "Yes, that captures what living with my father feels like," or "Yes, that’s what being cut from the football team felt like."
What is culture? Culture is the idea of what is wrong or right, the concept of what is acceptable within our society. Culture serves us as a guide, taking us to the "right way" and helping us to make sense of things that surrounds us. There are many different cultures around the world. A lot of them are similar in specific ways and others are just completely different, this difference explains why we think that people from different backgrounds are "weird".
I would like to adapt some of the methods I learned from the course TES 7410 to my future China’s English class. I do not think it is easy to use these methodologies in China’s English class not only for the size of the class, but also for most people have accepted the traditional education for many years. It may be a difficult thing, but I want to have a
My hometown, Jiaxing, located in the central east China, has served as a hub of communication between the north and south since the ancient time. In the previous decades, it is the most economically dynamic area of the nation, where historic moments meet the modern development.
Learning a new language isn’t always easy. It has it’s up and down moments but once I learned that new language I felt accomplished and a lot of new opportunities open for me. My point is that learning English for me wasn’t easy, but once I learned English, I was able to help out my parents more and a bunch of new doors opened for me. You can say by knowing English I had a little more power now at home because they depended a lot on me now but it also felt great just to help them out with their English.
There are many different types of events that shape who we are as writers and how we view literacy. Reading and writing is viewed as a chore among a number of people because of bad experiences they had when they were first starting to read and write. In my experience reading and writing has always been something to rejoice, not renounce, and that is because I have had positive memories about them.
Abstract Within the broader TESOL community, recent years have seen an increase in dialogue between two groups – critical practitioners (CP) and Christian English teachers (CET) who seek to combine their calling to teach with their calling to be a witness. While some are skeptical about the compatibility of these two callings (Pennycook, 2009; Phillipson, 2009), others have laid out a vision for how one might be both a critical practitioner and a Christian English teacher (Wong & Canagarajah, 2009; Purgason, 2009) citing the character traits of respect and humility as being key to this endeavor (Snow, 2009; Purgason, 2009). Much of the discussion on humility has centered around its role in dialogue (Canagarajah, 2009); language learning
Richards, J. C., Platt, J., & Plat, H. (2000). Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied linguistics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
The increasing impact of globalization has, in recent years, caused a significant shift in the goals of foreign language education from communicative competence to a requirement for intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997). He defined intercultural competence as the ability to establish and maintain relations with members of other culture but not necessarily linked to foreign language proficiency while intercultural communicative competence implies that the learner can do this in a foreign language (Helm & Guth, 2010). However, in a traditional language classroom, the focus of language teaching is to develop reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. If the focus on language teaching is to improve this set of
In this position, I 've had ample opportunity to work with undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines. Notably, I have worked closely with many students who speak English as a second language, and this has been the most challenging and the most rewarding part of my job. Several students have worked with me on a consistent basis, and it 's a great accomplishment to see their vocabulary improve through repeated contact with a peer, from whom they discover new words and phrases to better express their ideas. When I help them combine their accumulated knowledge of English grammar and sentence structure with these elements, the results are truly remarkable. My familiarity with the specific nuances of the English language that native Japanese speakers often struggle with, in conjunction with my people skills and cultural sensitivity, will exemplify me as a dependable, approachable source of information and allow me to achieve maximum results in the Japanese
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language that goes to his heart.” ‒ Nelson Mandela. Since the 1960’s learning a second language has decreased by 30 percent in today’s society. People who wish to learn an additional language often do so to communicate with people who reside in different countries. With an increase in today’s globalization, it is forcing companies throughout the world to break the language barrier. However, with the advancement of technology, numerous citizens find it unnecessary to learn another language, as a translation is at the tip of their fingers. The methods of learning a foreign language can differentiate between people. Nevertheless it has been
WORKS CITED Krashen, Stephen. The. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Pergamon Press, 2003. 1982 Omaggio, Alice C. Teaching Language in Context.