Course Paper

Second Language Interview

Interview 1: Second Language Interview

Xinyue Liu

CHAD 150

I asked my best friend Krystal to respond to questions about her experiences with

learning a second language. Her first language is Mandarin and the second language is English,

these two languages are completely different. Chinese language does not have an alphabet, but

its written language uses a system of symbols. In a symbolic system, the symbol stands for the

word itself - words are not made up of letters, as they are in an alphabetic system. Because of

this fundamental difference, Chinese learners may have great difficulty in reading English texts

and spelling words correctly. Many aspects of the English phonetic system pose difficulties for

Chinese learners. Some English phonemes do not exist in Chinese; stress and intonation patterns

are different. Krystal started learning English at kindergarten. In China, teachers only teach basic

English, and those things would happen in tests. Students only study for tests in China.

According to her, she really started to learn English is the time when she came to America,

which is 5 years ago. She chose to come to America and learn English because she believes that

Second Language Interview

she will have a better life here. The ways she learned English are by watching TV shows and

movies, made a lot of English-speaking friends, her friends speak English with her all the time

for helping her improve her English. In the beginning, communicating was hard but she never

gave up. She admitted that the challenging part of learning English is to memorize phrases,

expressions in English. Although she has been living in America for 5 years, she is still learning

English, she is expanding her own dictionary every day. She also noted that environmental and

social influence are the major factor of learning a second language. During the first month of

high school, she made a few English-speaking friends, they taught her some basic greeting

sentences first, slowly, they could talk to each other in English. Krystal could not believe that she

could learn a second language this fast.

Second Language Interview

References

Gardner, R., & Macintyre, P. (1992, October). A student's contributions to second language

learning. Part I: Cognitive variables. Language Teaching 25(04):211 - 220 DOI:

10.1017/S026144480000700X