dreaming of summer

This past week, I spent a good amount of time thinking back to the summer.

Not because I needed a reminder of glorious warm weather, or of many hours of freedom (though I do find myself getting lost remembering those good ole days!), but to reconnect with some language learning goals and approaches that I'd wanted to focus on this school year.

While I was studying in Kampala, I tried to focus my attention on the classroom work as well as the art of conversation and engaging in daily activities in Luganda. I did not do a lot of independent vocabulary memorization and written grammar practice because I knew that those activities were something I could focus on in the US, when I had less access to Luganda in daily life. However, I did create a mental list of things I wanted to practice when I was back in the US.

Although I've been implementing bits and pieces of the mental list in my language study this semester, this week I refocused my attention on it.

For example, one thing I wanted to do more intensive work on the verb tenses that I learned, such as the conditional, causative, reflexive, and reversive. In the past, writing a long list of sentences using one grammatical concept in different ways has been really helpful for my learning. So, on Friday, I spent a long time writing out a range of sentences using the causative tense. The causative is a tense I have a particularly hard time with, so it felt good to just use it over and over and over again. I definitely think it helped me work towards mastering it - though I definitely still need more practice.

This week, I plan to do more of that kind of work with some of the other verb tenses. I also want to dig into some of the resources I brought back from Kampala. I purchased a range of children's books and also brought back a few newspapers, and for some reason I've been putting off using them. I think it's because I've felt like I need to ration them off for some reason; if I used them up at the beginning of the year, I'd have nothing left by the end! I realize that this sounds sort of silly, but for some reason I have been saving these resources for some kind of mythical rainy day. In any case, the time is now! So I plan to pull out these documents and get the most out of them that I can.

In that vein, I am thinking about different ways I might use a physical newspaper for my learning. For example, I might take one news article and highlight all the words that I understand as I read it, and then come back to it later and highlight in another color to track my progress. Or, I might underline all the examples of a particular tense that I identify, and ensure that I know all of the verbs being used. If anyone has any other ideas for how to creatively use a newspaper for learning, I'd love to hear them!

It's so nice to have the summer to look back to for inspiration and a bit of guidance! I'm hoping it can continue to sustain me throughout the year.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

(not) The End

on not feeling guilty

nose to the grindstone