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English Language Learning Essay

829 Words4 Pages

AISARA YESSENOVA
EDUC 633
12.01.2015
MY STORY OF EMBRACING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

Before encountering the concept of plurilingual competence I have always considered my experience of languages learning to be messy and inconsistent. My maximalist preconception that only a native-like proficiency in the L2 can serve as a hallmark of successful language learning has disappeared. On my own example I illustrate that absolute mastery in a target language is elusive: being a native speaker of Kazakh I am far from speaking literary Kazakh. Hence, I do appreciate my linguistic repertoire that consists of varying levels of proficiency in Russian, English, German, Turkish and Polish, and Kazakh as a mother tongue. Some languages I acquired unconsciously, …show more content…

As an exchange student in Poland I took the Polish language classes along with the English-medium courses. For almost six months I was experiencing immersion in the Polish language. Owing to the transfer of some vocabulary and syntactic structures from Russian, which is also a Slavic language, I managed to understand the people talking around me. Relatively fast I picked up the conversational phrases and started speaking in Polish. This experience proves that immersion in a country with target language spoken facilitates the learning process by making it …show more content…

Some languages I studied deliberately, while others I acquired unconsciously or encountered by chance. To be honest, to some extent my productive and receptive skills in Kazakh are less developed compared with the linguistic performance in Russian and English. Some zealous supporters of the Kazakhisation ideology would label me as “shala-Kazakh” (half-Kazakh). This word-collocation has an extremely negative connotation: a person who betrays own mother tongue by speaking Russian or another language better than Kazakh. I cannot stand hearing this word. Though I do not speak literary Kazakh I still reverence the richness of my mother tongue. I still identify myself as native speaker of Kazakh.
Likewise I do appreciate my experience of learning Russian, English, German, Turkish, Korean and Polish. Notwithstanding the varied proficiency in aforementioned languages I perceive them as keys to global citizenship. All the languages I have experienced with comprise my identity not constrained by ethnicity but evolving simultaneously as I discover new culture, new mentality embedded in a

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