musings

Lately I have been thinking about the coping skills, strategies, and mechanisms that people utilize when learning a new language in order to not offend (or even to avoid interaction with) their target language counterparts.
As a language learner myself, I think there are many things that we do that effectively change our behavior, causing us to behave very differently than we do in our own culture and speaking in our native language. We might say things that aren't exactly true to keep our communications simple. We often pretend we understand, though we don't. We might even plan things in our day around the interactions we want to have (or those we wish to avoid). These observations are valuable in that they inform my teaching practice now.
Ultimately, learning a language is an extremely humbling experience. When I first began to learn Spanish, I had very little concept of the long, rewarding, transformative process that lay before me, and I knew nothing about Second Language Acquisition. My conceptions of what "bilingual" or "fluent" meant were vague, and I was ignorant about the depth of language - I mean, what does it really mean to know a language?
What is clear to me now about the work I did in my Master's program at MIIS is that it was extremely focused specifically on the connection between the practices of teaching and learning and the theory and science of language acquisition.
It is one thing to study pedagogy and methodology, and another to study language and understand its innerworkings. But it is yet another thing entirely to navigate the area where these two fields merge, and I believe to have credibility and to truly be able to sense your students' needs, it is necessary to have a background in foreign language learning or bilingualism.
My musings here are really just a reiteration of the things I thought, wrote, and read about during my two years in grad school, but now I am living them.