Friday, October 15, 2010
Facing Your Fears and Challenges Head On
I hope you all enjoyed your conference with me as much as I enjoyed talking with all of you. It is very exciting to see how all of you have progressed in the last two months. Language learning is a fascinating thing; no two people learn exactly alike. Some of you are stronger in speaking/listening and some of you are stronger in reading/writing. The goal of the next eight weeks is to challenge yourself and work on your weakest skills. It takes a lot of guts and courage to work on things that either scare us or that we think that are not good at (Note: I said think. Everyone can be fluent in a second language. The key is believing that yourself). However, you might be absolutely amazed by your results. Sometimes language learning is like finding that one difficult piece of the jigsaw puzzle; by finding it, all the other pieces fall into place. For example, if you are weak in writing, you might just find that if you have a breakthrough in writing that suddenly you can also read with less difficulty and that you have more confidence when speaking. This might in turn give you sudden clarity with your listening comprehension.
On the other hand, sometimes we don't want to be successful (in this case fluent) because it scares us. We are frightened that if we can no longer classify ourselves as ESL students that people will have too great of expectations upon us or that we can't fall back on this label when we think we need to. Remember, you will be learning English for you whole life and that to be fluent in a language is a fluid topic. You might be fluent at the end of L5, but how will you label yourself in five years, or ten or twenty? The point is, don't be scared about becoming fluent. Fluency will make you life easier, not more difficult.
Stepping out into the unknown is scary. The good thing to know is that we all have to in the course of our lives and that there is always support. For example, when L5 ends I don't suddenly stop being your teacher. I will always be your teacher. You can always read this blog, or e-mail me pieces of writing that you would like me to help you with editing. So if the fear of not having support at the end of L5 has been worrying you, don't worry about it. I'm not going anywhere.
Step into the unknown. Challenge yourself by setting what may seem to be an insane goal for the next eight weeks:
I will be fluent in English by December.
See what happens...
Prepare for the journey of a lifetime...
Today's Holidays from Around the World
Australia: International Day of Older People: World Rural Woman's Day
Burkina Faso:
French Guiana: Cayenne Festival
Sri Lanka: National Tree Planting Day
Tunisia: Evacuation Day
United States of America: Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day
Homework for Friday, October 15, 2010
Finish reading Wuthering Heights. Review the entire book. We will have a comprehensive test on Monday to test your reading comprehension.
Study the spelling word list. Test is on Monday too.
Here are the links for all of the Online Worksheets and Quizzes for Units 1-5. Take a moment this weekend to turn in any missing homework. Remember, each assignment is worth 5 points!
~Happy Studying!~
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