February Post

This Tuesday I started my new mentorship at a German II course taught at Mt. Sac. I really enjoyed being there the first day and speaking with the students. In the German II class the students will be learning how to speak in the past tense which is a major and complicated part of second language acquisition especially in the German language. The first day was mainly review and introduction. The students reviewed how to create statements and questions. I sat on the side and took notes about how the students spoke. I noticed a lot of directly translated syntax from English to German. Students would use English syntax to form German sentences. This helps support my third answer to my EQ is language family proximity. This transfer of syntax would be helpful if German syntax was similar to English syntax, but since it's not the syntax gets in the way of language learning. If they were similar it would be greatly beneficial to the leaner and would speed up the acquisition process.