Chapter 2 – Approaches to (Language) Learning
Connecting the Dots to your Story
Logan Fisher; Bibi Halima; and Keli Yerian
Language learning can be super intimidating! At times it can be Greek to you, or Chinese, or Swahili (get the joke?) and you can feel overwhelmed because you don’t know how to approach it. In a personal story below, Logan reflects on their early Spanish language learning path and identifies some implicit and explicit learning approaches and methods used in their Spanish classes.
Now we invite you to think about your approaches to language learning in the past. Let’s revisit some of our topics and ask ourselves questions.
- What learning theories have I experienced in my language learning?
- Which aspects of my L2 abilities are procedural and which are declarative?
- Have I experienced multimodality in my language learning? How? Did it help?
- Was my language learning mostly implicit or explicit?
- What teaching methods did my teachers use in their classrooms? Was there one that worked better for me?
We hope that you take away ideas from this chapter and apply them to your language learning however you see fit and however works for you. Learning is not one-size-fits-all, and so to say that there is a better way to learn is simply not true. You have to find what best works for you. Try studying an L2 using some of these concepts brought up, like watching TV for implicit learning and then using a dictionary for explicit learning for vocabulary you didn’t pick up through context. Hopefully you don’t just learn about languages through the process, but also about yourself.