De Anza College Learning a Second Language Weekly Discussion In this week’s discussion, you are going to reflect about joys and struggles of second languag

De Anza College Learning a Second Language Weekly Discussion In this week’s discussion, you are going to reflect about joys and struggles of second language acquisition.

Original discussion post must be submitted before 9.00am on Wednesday:

Step 1-

Read the essay Mute in an English-Only World by Chang-Rae Lee:

http://happano.sub.jp/happano/birdsong/html/4-Chang-Rae.html (Links to an external site.)

Step 2- Review the Box 3-3 on page 65 of the textbook: “Why Foreign Speakers Have Trouble with English”

Step 3-

Watch the following video about the fear of making mistakes in a second language. This video does not relate to only English- any speaker of any foreign language can feel the same way.

Do you hate speaking English around NATIVE SPEAKERS? (Links to an external site.)

Step 4:

Watch the following short video about the benefits of learning a foreign language:

How learning a new language makes you more tolerant (Links to an external site.)

Step 5-

Write your original post for the Week 7 Discussion: In your post, answer the following questions. You can choose Option A or Option B or respond to both.

Option A:

What languages do you speak? What is your language learning experience? When did you start learning a second language? What is/was the easiest, and what is/was the most difficult part of learning a foreign language for you? (Consider different areas of linguistics, such as morphology, syntax, and phonetics.)

Option B:

What do you think makes learning your native language difficult for those from other countries? If you were to teach someone your native language, what words and phrases would you teach first (consider what is important in your culture that those who are from a different culture should understand).

* Your original post should be 200-250 words long.

RESPONSE TO THE POSTS OF YOUR 2 CLASSMATES- must be submitted before 9.00am on Friday:

Follow these steps to write the discussion response:

1. Read all posts of your classmates.

2. Find a classmate who has not received a response to his/her post yet. You CANNOT respond to an original post which has already received a response if there are still some posts that have not received a response.

3. Just as you would during a spoken discussion, write what your think about the ideas of your classmate. You can add more ideas to the points that your classmate has made or write a different opinion in a polite manner.

* The response to each post should be 100-150 words long.