READING WITH A 7 YEAR OLD

One of the assigned readings for Friday was the article called "Fighting For Our Lives" by Deborah Tannen. While I was reading my seven year-old sister came to spend time with me. So I decided to entertain her while I did my homework. I did this by making her read me the article. We were going to split the article because she would read one paragraph and then I would follow suit with the next. We eventually get the aggressive part of war and how Americans will turn a lot of metaphors to having a war theme.

When the example of "Blood lust" came into picture and she was pretty perplexed by this. It was hard for her to wrap her head around the idea of Blood lust and when I told her they wanted blood. She gave me this crazy look, as I knew she would. I explained to her the idea of a metaphor. I gave her the example of me saying "I could eat a whale right now" which is a metaphor for me being super hungry. I then went back to explain how blood lust is a representation of aggressive behavior.

Throughout this reading process her and I created, I began to wonder when students, even young ones, become aware of different sayings for different meanings. Metaphors like "take a shot at it" is not usually taken like a war reference unless you're super analyzing it. And with new generations different metaphors will arise because the way they speak are very different.

2ND LANGUAGE LEARNING AND OUT OF THE CLASSROOM EXPOSURE

The article I read was on how language learning can be different when it is coming from outside the classroom. This article is a strong supporter for people to receive outside the classroom exposure because often time the classroom method of learning a language can be insufficient. If language can be thought in a less formal setting then it helps the person tie learning the language into something that they see happening in an everyday surrounding. The article goes on to discuss how a native language speakers deal with learning new lemmas everyday and how it is impossible to teach over 42 thousand terminologies inside a formal classroom. That's a reason that the article advises people to scout outside the classroom for different opportunities where they can be exposed to the language they're trying to learn in an every day type of scenario.

The article also discussed how muti language speakers know a thousand of "extra" words which, if you're bilingual, you start to connect those words into your mind and bring up the different meanings behind them. An idea that raised was learning language through film watching. In the case of children, they are able to pick up multiple words from short subtitled films while adults will pick up words even without subtitles due to the context that lays within the screen. You can easily see this occur in countries like Belgium where they really don't have any TV shows that are in their native language.

De Wilde, V., Brysbaert, M., & Eyckmans, J. (2020). Learning English through out-of-school exposure. Which levels of language proficiency are attained and which types of input are important? Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, 23(1), 171–185. https://doi-org.proxyau.wrlc.org/10.1017/S1366728918001062

Code Switiching

The documentary that we watched in class on Tuesday made me question a lot of things. It is crazy that once you learn something new, like what the term of Code Switching, you then start to connect it to all the things that are related to that one specific thing. 

After the documentary, I wondered if Mainland China was just choosing to go after Hong Kong for Code Switching, because I lack knowledge on other aspects of their history. Then, that made me question why they would only go after code switching, since code switching happens in the slightest of manners, hundreds of times a day. 

The way that you change your words to classier ones when you speak to a professor or to an older adult. The way that even throughout different friend groups you will switch the way you speak and how it varies depending on the person to which you are speaking to. These are just examples of inner code switches that can occur within the same language.

Then there's code switches that can occur when you speak with foreign relative. My family is very guilty of this. If not all, most of my moms sentences contains both English and Spanish words mixed into her sentence to complete one fragment. We call it Spanglish because it has both Spanish and English mixed into the way that she speaks regularly. I think that it's very normal to be around this atmosphere because I've grown up with it. I don't think twice when I hear someone in their native language speak to someone else but then incorporate English within their conversation. I think its a natural process of integrating cultures and being an immigrant or descendant from an immigrant family.

Therefore, it's quite troubling to see a documentary when you hear someone call something "disgusting" in a documentary when commenting of Code Switches, because in a world where things are constantly evolving and should be innovating, you would think there would be bigger issues to worry about.