My personal

experience learning a second language

Name: Raina (Kim Kwang Hee)

Date: 21th of March 2015

Tesol Class: No.110

I met a second language when I entered a middle school frist.

I was confused so much at that time. Because a second language was different with my first language that I spoke and wrote easily in daily life.

Without knowing how I would accept a second language efficiently, I was taught a second language from a teacher and memorized its contents which a teacher emphasized mechanically only for a school exam. It was helpful a little bit for me to read and translate the short and simple second language stories. But still, I had a difficult time writing and speaking in a second language.

After I entered a college and I needed to understand well a second language that was my major. So, I had to find the difference between a second language and my first language. Through many books and the famous second language teachers, I came to know that the most important difference between them was the structure of a language. After that, when I met new words of a second language, I not only found out their meanings but also checked their word classes in a dictionary. And I could understand the structure, in other words, the order of a second language. Understanding grammatical structure was helpful for me to learn a second language better. As be known well, because a verb is a standard of an language, if I can find a right place of a verb in a second language, I can also predict the structure of a second language and understand it easily. It enabled me to rough out and utter a second language a little bit.

After graduation a collage, I worked at an English academy.

I think I learned a second language much more in this place. I taught a second language to the students who were from the schoolchild to the middle school students.

To give the information of a second language to them easily, I tried to be a learner like them. As a student’s position, I prepared class focused on how he or she would understand and accept a second language well. But It made me learn the second language better than my students.

The class was conducted with a monitor visually and acoustically. The students watched the target language in the monitor and repeated each sound of it several times. And then, I called on each student to speak it again. This activity made the target language stored in the students’ brains and mine. After enough repeating, I explained the concept of the target language and made some sentences with students by using it. Next, students learned a second language through the exercise questions on their books. And I called on some students or volunteers to announce their own answers and asked the other students whether they are correct or not. If they weren’t right, I let the students check the correct answers with the monitor. This also gave me the definite knowledge of a second language.

Moreover, when I checked the students’ homework, I could think of various expressions of a second language. I had to find the new expressions that I didn’t know exactly, such as a language form, synonym and its usage from the book or on the Internet. So after all, it made me know many different expressions of a second language.

This class helped me to develop my grammar, writing, pronunciation and speaking ability of a second language.

My personal experience learning a second language at that time influenced on my present second language ability a lot and made me feel confident and happy.

Although I don’t still have enough knowledge of a second language, I am sure that My personal experience learning a second language previously gave me a great chance to challenge this TESOL course.