Minding Your Own Language Learning

RUNNING HEAD: Minding Your Own Language Learning 1

Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano

Minding Your Own Language Learning

By Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano

Sunday, June 28, 2015 Twitter: @jonacuso

Post 177

Mindfulness does not just mean to be aware of what others do or feel (or what I,

as an individual feel and do), but it is a conscious act that allows us to introspectively and

retrospectively analyze how things happen(ed) in life, such as the way a foreign language

was acquired. At times it is helpful to place oneself in the shoes of ones learners to tell

them that one understands what they are going or have gone through as language

students. Lets mindfully ask ourselves these questions or just read the following answers.

What were the contexts in which you felt you were most successful in learning a

language? Since now I am getting to understand language learning processes better, in

hindsight I can see myself years ago learning English and being exposed to lots of social

interaction in class, but with one professor I got at University of Costa Rica whose class

was solely delivered from her desk. Prof. Pacheco never gave me or my parents any way



to socially work with other peers to try out the development of our interlanguage and

test our comprehension of the target language. Now as an ELT instructor, and thanks to

that Prof. Pacheco, in a mindful act for the sake of my lesson plan, I provide my pupils

with zone-of-proximal-development opportunities to exercise their English, to feel

comfortable in my class, and to give their interlanguage a try. Somehow I want to

guarantee that my language trainees get a classroom setting that inspires them with

activities that can foster their language proficiency in a social context.

Did you learn best in a classroom context? With language instructors such as

Prof. Pacheco at UCR, I cannot see much evolution of language in learners (because I

saw none in my case). But my personal language learning story is not just connected to

a single unmindful teaching professional; there were people who really helped me a lot

to continue developing my language. However, being retrospectively and mindfully alert,

the classroom context was not the best place for me oftentimes. There were partners

who recurrently went back to our native language to discuss what the instructor asked

us to consider and talk over among ourselves. Committed peers were not always nearby,

and for that reason I self-taught myself many things I could not either learn with my

uncooperative peers or in a class that turned out to be too theoretical and abstract for

me or socially tracked off. As a language instructor, and in an act of mindfulness once

more, my students are much more involved in routine tasks that can assist them to help

them develop their language proficiency in various ways: from grammar to pronunciation,

and from social skills to hierarchical thinking skills. Anything that resembles the way native

speakers use the language in a foreign country is something that can be tried out in class

to help learners construct their knowledge of the target language and to practice it.

If you have visited a country where you had to learn at least some basics of a

second language, what helped? What didnt help? As a language learner, I never visited

any English-speaking country, nor did I have to learn the basis of a second language in



a foreign country. I learned English in my Spanish-speaking home country. It was until

later in life, as a graduate student, when I had the opportunity to travel to the United

States for a teacher training course, several years after I had graduated from UCR. But

before that traveling chance materialized, there were plenty of British, American, and

Canadian native speakers who shared their language with me through lengthy

conversations or small chats. In a mindful act in the search to improve my language

proficiency, I looked for any opportunity to have a conversation with a native speaker to

once again- try out the evolution of my interlanguage. At this point of my professional

teaching life, I recurrently ask my pupils to go and look for those opportunities to practice

their English! And better yet, if they can travel to an English-speaking country for a while,

I ask them to seize the chance and explore other linguistic horizons that are only hosted

in a country where the target language is spoken.

In brief, as a language instructor one has to be mindful of how ones language

learning process took place. Our experiences can be guiding stars for what we want to

instill in our learners to experience a more down-to-earth and meaningful way of learning

or to go and search for language experiences that can help them learn, consolidate their

learning, or try out what has been learned and moved into the interlanguage. We were

foreign language learners; why cant we use all that experience to assist our students in

their language learning journey?

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Minding Your Own Language Learning