Journal Entry

While finishing up this course, I do not feel as comfortable with my second language as I was hoping I would. I love the language and think it is absolutely beautiful, and as I have stated in the past I truly believe I would like to continue to learn how to better communicate in French.

With this being said I feel my self-esteem is low at the amount I have accomplished thus far, but still very high with the hope that I can push myself enough to at least learn a small amount of the language enough to carry on a small conversation if ever needed. My self-efficacy is pretty much right in the middle on a low to high scale. I completed many tasks, but my overall goals were not all completely achieved. Although I did not expect to be able to carry on a complete conversation within a four week class, I would have liked to be able to know a couple complete sentences. I know individual words, but they do not flow well enough to make a complete sentence someone can understand. Which brings me to my willingness to communicate, which I would have to say at this point is still pretty low, because I do not believe anyone would understand me, and people may just laugh at me for trying at this point. Inhibition would be at a high scale because I do not feel that I would be comfortable walking up to someone I do not know and be able to carry on a conversation with them in French. I think I would start to feel very nervous that they would not be able to understand me, which is where risk taking comes into play. I think if someone knew where I was in my language studies, I may try to have a conversation with them, so they could tell me how I am doing, what I need to work on, and maybe listening to someone speak back to me may help with my fluency. I believe my overall personality is more of an extraversion personality, but when you involve a second language that I do not know very well I tend to have a more introversion personality because I do not believe I would just walk up to someone random and start a conversation.

I believe that all of these factors go hand in hand with each other. I think if I have a larger self-esteem and more of a willingness to communicate, than I would be more of a risk taker and have more of an extraversion personality. Now that I have gone through each step in the second language learning process I believe the top elements is to make sure you work hard to achieve the goals you would like to achieve by a certain time, and doing it properly. Skipping around and not learning the fundamentals first then moving to pronunciation, and then flow, may allow for confusion and stress. One issue I definitely had was staying focused when frustration hit because I couldn’t pronounce a certain word like the website did. I believe characteristics of a successful teacher are being able to relate and understand her students. A teacher who has been through the same steps of learning two languages, can better relate to the problems her students may be experiencing, and may possibly have tips as how to understand something better.

The benefit I gained from the journal-writing process is having the ability to show my accomplishments, but also explain where I am lacking the ability to speak fluent French. I would change the journal process in order to be able to better explain my personal feelings during this process, instead of having certain topics to have to write about. Although I do love having guidelines, I would like to really incorporate my own personal feelings during this process.