Part of my time at the Center for Intercultural Training included a two-week Second Language Acquisition (SLA) course. SLA taught me a lot about the best ways to learn a new language. One good way to start learning a new language is with a language helper. A language helper is typically a native speaker of the language you are learning. They are there to help you learn vocabulary and how the language sounds, but they are not teaching you as a tutor. The learner is in charge of planning and directing the sessions. In SLA we had a language helper come in to help us learn how this process and way of learning works. Here is an example of one of our sessions.
On the first day with our new language helper, my team and I came prepared with our previously made lesson plan and picture cards, ready to learn some Russian words. We had drawings depicting words and phrases like “hello”, “goodbye”, “thank you”, and “what is this”. We had other drawings to show pronouns and rooms in a house, things you may need to know in the first few weeks living in a new country. We greeted our language helper and spent a few minutes getting to know each other before getting down to business. It was important to our facilitators that we not repeat any of the words we were learning yet, just listen and get a sense of how the language sounds. We would point at one of our picture cards and listen to the correct pronunciation from our language helper. We then would play different matching games with our various picture cards as well as act out different verbs to learn words like walk, talk, sit, and run. Over that first session, we learned over 25 new words! We were able to take charge of our language learning and guide each session towards what we needed to learn that day.
While I am in Mexico, I won’t just be learning Spanish in a classroom or with the help of a language helper, I’ll be fully immersed in it. We learned at CIT that language can not be separated from culture, so it is important to learn both. I am looking forward to exploring my new community and interacting with the people there. I fully expect to make a complete fool out of myself and say the wrong things as I am learning, but I know that is what will help me learn the most. It is important to me that I go through every day intentionally so that I can learn the most language and culture that I can in my two years there.