Independent Component 1

L)I, Lara McConnaughey, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.

The books and articles that were assigned to me in the ENG 323 Language Acquisition class helped me complete the component. These include: How Languages are Learned, The Power of Reading, Cardenas, Krashen

I took ENG 323 Language Acquisition, a class taught at Cal-Poly by my mentor Karen Russikoff. Th course included class on MW from 4:00PM-5:50PM. The class had an independent essay, a group assigned report,  many hours of independent reading and several tests.

Here is a description of the class:

I) This class is an upper division course which means that one needs at least 70 units of college credit to take the course. 70 units is basically Junior standing in college. This class is taken by mostly English majors and is required in order to obtain an English major or minor. The youngest person in the class (besides me) was 10 years old. The class included a group report which I have attached on the left side of my blog. This report took over 30 hours of work to complete. I also learned the full IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet) for English and can write and read the IPA.

I got a B+ in the class which I am pretty proud of because as I said before it is an upper division class and I didn't take the prerequisite. 

A) My independent component gave me all of my foundation for this project. The entire class was based on what my topic is all about. When I first started doing research on this topic I was geared mostly toward the computational side of linguistics and how utilizing computers can help us better understand languages and learn languages. When I was taking this class it made me realize before I can study language acquisition using computers I must understand how languages are acquired in general. This class introduced me to second language acquisition theories, methods, and terminology. For example I learned about the critical period hypothesis and how it pertains to second language acquisition and pronunciation. Learning this actually gave me the foundation for my first answer. I believe without this class I wouldn't have been able to come up with a good essential question or first answer.