Senior blog reflection

(1) Positive Statement
I'm most proud of my overall content of my presentation because I feel like I had very solid information about linguistics n and answers to my EQ.

(2) Questions to Consider

a.     What assessment would you give yourself on your Block Presentation (self-assessment)
AE    

b.     What assessment would you give yourself on your overall senior project (self-assessment)
AE    

(3) What worked for you in your senior project?
I think taking a class at Cal-Poly for my independent component 1 really worked because it gave me a great foundation for my senior project.

(4) (What didn't work)
I wish I would have been able to do mentorship with both my mentors through your my entire senior year instead on switching of mentorships. However doing two mentorships gave me two aspects for my answers to my EQ.

(5) Finding Value
Senior project has helped my solidify my majors in college as linguists and computer science. It also has given me an excilent linguistic foundation to build off of. When I went to Calday at Berekeley I was able to talk to the linguists and understand their lingo.

Blog 21 Mentorship

Contact: Jennifer Tsia Mt. Sac Community College (626) 321-1888

·   Interpretive
     What is the most important thing you gained from this experience? Why?

The most important thing I gained from this experience was to be able to see all the theories and studies I read about at work in a classroom environment. This was important because first semester I learned about second language acquisition theories, but reading about them and understanding them are two different animals. By completing my mentorship in a second language classroom enviroment I was able to see how these different factors of language acquisition were affecting students studying a second language. For example I learned about how an affective filter can prevent learners from acquiring a second language because it hinders there ability to fully grasp concepts. In the German II class during mentorship there is a very shy boy that doesn't ask questions and therefore he isn't getting input. He has a very high affective filter that is affecting his acquisition process.

   Applied
     How has what you've done helped you to answer your EQ?  Please explain.

My mentorship has helped me answer my EQ because it first gave me the foundation to be able to come up with my EQ then it gave me real world examples of my answers to my EQ. My mentorship also helped me determine my best answer. It did this by giving me real life examples of textbook theories. For example motivation and age are all factors that can be seen in the classroom. Especially with the foreign students I can hear their accents in both English and German, but I can also tell that they have high levels of intrinsic motivation. This helped me get my best answer because although their motivation was high they already have passed the critical period and therefore will be unable to produce certain characteristics that someone that started learning German at a younger age may be able to produce.

Blog 20: Exit Interview

(1) What is your essential question and answers?  What is your best answer and why?

      What is the most important factor in second language acquisition for a non-native speaker? 

1. Answer 1: Age affects a non-native speakers ability to acquire a language in many ways making it one of the most important factors in second language acquisition.
2. Answer 2:  The motivational reason for a non-native speaker to learn the target language is one of the most important factors in second language acquisition
3. Answer 3: Proximity of a persons native tongue to the family group of his or her target language is the most important factor in language acquisition for a non-native speaker.

Best Answer: Age in which that non-native speaker is exposed to and starts to acquire his/her target language. I chose this answer as my best answer because through all my research the age in which someone starts to acquire his/her second language can have great benefits in the development of fluency in the target language. The age in which one starts their SLA process can affect their fluency of pronunciation, the time it takes to grasp grammatical and lexical concepts, and the motivation one has to learn a language.  This answer is better than the other two of my answers because in some ways age of SLA encompasses the other two answers.

(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

      I first went to my original mentor Dr. Russikoff and asked her my essential question. She told me that it would be almost impossible to argue that one factor is the most important factor in SLA. So together we compiled a list of possible answers to this question. From this list we decided which ones are more important than the others. In the end we ended up with about 5 possible answers, but from there we could not narrow the answer down any further. Those five answers were all arguably of equal importance. From there I researched the five answers and picked the answers I could find the most research on. When it came to picking my best answer I went with my personal belief rather than statistical and scientific evidence. I did this because all three of my answers had enough evidence to allow them to be the most important factor.

(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

      My original mentor was only able to help me for the first semester of school. After that she got to busy with classes and her new book release that occurred in Taiwan. I solved this problem by finding a new mentor. With my first mentor I got mostly the scientific and factual aspects of linguistics. With my second mentor I really wanted to see how the concepts I learned out of books and articles were applied into a classroom. So I started to do mentor ship being a teachers assistant  at Mt. Sac in a German II class. 

(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

     My two most important sources were the book "How Languages are Learned" by Lightbown and Spada and Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition taught to me by me Dr. Russikoff during my independent component.  The book "How languages are learned" was most important to answer my essential question because it provided me with my first and second answers. The book explains how first languages are learned then links those concepts to second languages. It showed me the progress of a persons cognitive development as related to language acquisition. For example in first language acquisition syntax acquisition occurs in a certain order, that order is the same for second language acquisition. The Krashens theories of second language acquisition were important to answering my essential question because I used his theories about the aspects of a second language to check off if a factor helped or not. Krashen's theories are affective filter, natural order, input, monitor, and acquisition. All three of my answers help in some way or another will all of his theories for successful second language acquisition.

Blog 19: Independent Component 2

LITERAL
(a) I, student name, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.
(b)The most helpful source I had for this component was this published experiment called "Why Are You Learning a Second Language? Motivational Orientations and Self-Determination Theory" this source helped me create and analyze my questionnaires.
(c)--------------------->
(d) For my independent component I explored the answer two my EQ more in two ways by observing foreign language classes and by analyzing the data collected from the questionnaires filled out by students in a second language class.  Observing classes helped me answer my question because I got to see how SL teachers try to motivate students.

INTERPRETIVE 
Usually during mentor ship I am up walking around actively helping the class with its language learning process. For two weeks (4 classes) I instead sat in the back of the class and observed the students behavior in class. I then created and administered questionnaires to both the college students and students that take Spanish at I-Poly. I had to explain the questionnaires and answer any question any particular person had. I then analyzed the questionnaires based on what I knew about the course that they are currently enrolled in and all of my SLA knowledge. I collected 94 questionnaires and each questionnaire took me about ten minutes to analyze and record. (If needed I can produce the questionnaires, but I felt as if it would be a waste of time to scan and upload them) I then used this data to create the wonderful graphs and findings that are pictured bellow. 

This is the questionnaire that I created using information from my main source "Why Are You Learning a Second Language? Motivational Orientations and Self-Determination Theory". The purpose of this questionnaire was to access whether a students motivation was intrinsic or extrinsic and to also see what they believe has been most important int heir opinion to their L2 acquisition process.

This graph shows the motivational reason students had to learn a second language. Their motivation either intrinsic or extrinsic was determined using the answers to the questionnaires. 17% of students  had intrinsic motivation and 83 % had extrinsic motivation. Of the students that were intrinsically motivated 11 of them were college students and 5 of them were high school students. Of the students that were extrinsically motivated 69 of them were high school students and 9 of them were college students.

This table shows the various answers that were given in response to the second to last question on the survey. The most popular answer was family which is an extrinsic motivation.

This graph shows all the languages that the students that were surveyed put down on the questionnaire.

APPLIED
When I first started this component I already had all three of my answers to my EQ. I used this component to solidify my answer and discover which of my answers should be my best answer. Most of the research I have done and found so far has all been from a linguists or teachers perspective. For this component I went on the other side of the language acquisition process to the learners of a second language. by giving out questionnaires i was able to determine that my best answer to me EQ should be age. A lot of this component had to do with determining motivation, but when it comes down too it the age in which a person started their acquisition process determined their fluency. The younger the students were when they started their acquisition process the better they were at the language. 

April Post

    I was fortunate enough to be able to visit UC Berkeley for Cal-Day which is an open house for admitted students for the university. During Cal-Day the linguistics department had an "Ask a Linguist" information session. Throughout this session you could go to the phonetics lab and talk to current undergraduate, graduate, and professors in the linguistic department. You could also get your voice recorded in the phonetic lab booth. (pictured above) I got my voice recorded saying my name. The recording is then transferred and can be viewed using the frequency scale. Higher pitch is higher frequency lower pitch is lower frequency. The linguist Dr. Lin that recorded my voice told me that just by looking at my recorded voice she can tell I am from California. The reason she could tell that I was a Californian was because I had an up tone. An up tone is when the end of a sentence, phrase, or word ends in a higher pitch. When I said my name my last syllable ended in an up tone. This up tone can be found in almost all Californians speech. I found this interesting because this can be applied to analyzing different languages and how their melody influences cognition.

Third Answer

EQ: What is the most important factor in language acquisition for a non-native speaker.

• Proximity of a persons native tongue to the family group of his or her target language is the most important factor in language acquisition for a non-native speaker.
• When languages are in the same family group they share lexicon making lexical acquisition faster. For example German and English are in the same language family (Germanic) and they share words like: Wanderlust, Blitz, Kindergarten
• When languages are in the same family group they share similar syntax. For example Spanish and French are both part of the same language family and therefore have similar syntax like: Subject Verb Object to emphasize the object
• Language family groups can cause positive or negative transfers between the native language and the target language. For example if a Chinese man were trying to speak a Germanic language using Chinese syntax the transfer would be negative. If the same man used his Chinese syntax to speak Cantonese the syntax transfer would be negative.
• The closer a target language is to a persons native tongue the faster they will be able to acquire the target language.

March Post

          I am continuing my mentor ship with Frau Tsia at Mt. Sac helping out and observing the German II class. Frau Tsia is also the German teacher at Claremont High School. She asked me if I would be able to help her create the program for her up and coming Gartenfest German poetry recitation. I accepted the assignment because it would be a good way to look at work of high school students. Up until this point I have really only seen L2 acquisition class work of college students. For the program I helped proof read and format the program. The program contained all the poems that were to be recited in both German and English. My main job besides formatting was to make sure that the German matched the  English. I was able to relate my work doing the proof reading to my possible third answer to my essential question which is language family proximity to ones native tongue. There were a lot of positive and negative lexical transfers within the translations. A lot of the negative transfers had to do with false cognates between German and English. A false cognate is a word that sounds like another word, but has a different meaning. The most frequent false cognate in the translations was the German word "will" (Which means to want to so something) to the English word "will" (Which means that one is going to do something). The Gartenfest occurred on March 13th and my mentor was kind enough to put my name on the program (Pictured Above).