Spanish Class - 1st Meeting: An Encounter

Photo taken from http://www.uni.edu/becker/Spanish3.html

Notes from Spanish Class1st meeting:
We were 2 Filipinos, 1 Kuwaiti, 4 Chinese and 1 Indonesian sitting around the table at Campus Dine Central.We munched on our sandwiched, cold pasta, doughnuts and hot beverages. They will be our early dinner and the preparation for our 2 hours adventure to the 'foreign land'. No... we are not going abroad. We are taking language classes and that day was our first class.

We talked in excited tone but no one cannot deny the underlying worry in every utterance. It may sounds funny of why us, the English speaking postgraduates whose native language are not English, should feel anxious and worrisome on second/foreign language class. We have been there and done that before.

I personally can feel the 'butterflies in your stomach' feeling. Start from that knot in my tummy, crept up to my throat, threatening the travel of my just-swallowed doughnut bite then it ends up on my now cold finger-tips. It is the thought of the 'unknown'  and unfamiliar language, pronunciation, word order, structures and grammar. The question of "can I do it?", "Will I ever be able to use it in basic conversation" and all the What-Ifs questions. Then comes the inquiries of "I wonder what the teacher will be like", "Is he/she strict? fun? Boring?", "What about my classmate? Will they be fun, friendly, cooperative or will they be snobbish, arrogant and uncooperative?", "Can I be all those for them? Will they be able to see me that way".

Registering all this questions might sounds, again, silly to you... but after much though I think I should put this in my learning diary. I am experiencing the anxiety of student learning second language. Referring to Krashen notion that in order to succeed in acquiring / learning a language, a student must have high motivation, high self-esteem/confidence and low (to null) Anxiety. My anxiety is considerably quite low for sure for I have deiced to come a long for an expereince, thus my level of 'burden' is lighter and that will contribute to the decrease of my level of anxiety.

OK, so it's time to go to class. I peek through the glass strip on the door and saw some of my fellow classmates are already there. I took one big breath and put a smile on my face as I opened the door.
"Hiya!", I said... and so it is... Hello, adventure! Bring it on!

You cannot study Second Language Acquisition without putting yourself in the shoes of the learner. I mean, we have all been there, as a student, learning our second language - be it English, Spanish, Dutch, German etc. But to rely entirely on those distant memory to fully understand all the notion of SLA will be very naive. Back then, we were studying, learning and acquiring the language. We didn't bother to think which part of our brain works to incorporated those strange noises that should make sense or which theory is applied for our case of acquisition and learning. In SLA class, it is safe to look back at these experience but this distant memory might be out of touch. Enrolling in a foreign/second language class along side the SLA study is a genious approach. For in my case, I have learned English for many many years now. I finish my undergraduate 5 years ago but my language learning experience 'finish' 12 years ago. It 'ended' when I begun my BA study on English teaching. In a sense I no longer studying the language (English) but the teaching aspects, approaches etc. During my BA, I went on teaching although I have been teaching long before I entered University life. Thus in my opinion, I (and us as teachers) sometimes forget how intimidating it is to begin studying a new language.

It was exactly what I felt when I came to sit at my 1st Spanish class. It was all those anxiety on whether I can cut it. I worry if I will make a fool of myself. I worry if I will not understand a single thing. But I am also excited of the experiences and possibility of speaking in another language.

Our first class doesn't exactly start with a big bang. Well of course, we barely know each other. Our teacher, Ms. Helen Quinn, has that warm smile that assure you that things will be alright. She got us to stand up and walk away from behind out tables and stand together in a circle in the middle of the room. We're going to introduce ourselves. -- This really broke the ice especially because at least we now each other name.
Then we got to 'Spanisized' (I know... I know... this is not English word...) our names. It means we need to pronounce our name the way they do it in Spain or modify your name to make it a Spanish one. My name Helena is pronouced 'Elena'. But some of my Chinese friends got a new modified names. Such as Lei lei becomes Layla, San Den becomes Cindy, Jin becomes Ginny etc. This exercise according to me, helped us with self-confidence. Because we got to choose the 'cool' version of our name.

We studied basic introduction sequence, alphabeth and numbers as well as learning the name of the country in spanish and name of profession in spanish. with lots of pair work, physical actions and trial and error.

My note for the teaching approach on the first class is that

1. The teacher enable to bring fun but serious class atmosphere but most importantly, 
2. Creating safe space for learning to happen
3. She taught the basic cue sentences that are useful in class
4. She speaks 60-70% in Spanish.