From a learner's perspective: How our 24-year-old intern Shiyi Zhang, who just received her master's degree from Suffolk University, took the first steps towards becoming bilingual.
My name is Shiyi Zhang and I was born and grew up in Beijing, China. When I was 19 years old I moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, a place that I had never even heard of. I went there as an exchange student and stayed for an academic year. In the exchange program, 30 students from my university in Beijing went together, including me and my best friend and roommate, Bi.
It was my first time ever being abroad. I flew across the ocean from Beijing to Chicago, then from Chicago to Minneapolis. Late at night, after I got off the plane and got my two giant 29-inch suitcases, standing alone at the Minneapolis international airport, I was lost. I had no idea how should I get to the hotel that I randomly booked online. After ten minutes talking with the airport help center, I finally got myself into a taxi and got to the hotel. I remembered the only thing that the concierge person said to me was "welcome to the United States."
The first couple of days were exciting and challenging for all of us international students. We were excited and ready to experience a brand new life. At the same time, we needed to communicate in English with everyone, which was quite a challenge. Don't get me wrong, I started to learn English since I was ten years old and I was excellent at all my exams. However, things changed when I started to try to communicate fluently with my professors and classmates. I couldn't catch what professors said in class and I had trouble understanding my classmates. I got confused and started to wonder what went wrong from my past ten years of English study that all seemed useless at that time.
I decided to try to improve my English by paying more attention in class, but no matter how hard I had tried, I still couldn't catch the whole class lecture by listening only once. So I started to record my professors' lectures, as they had encouraged me to. After class, I listened over and over again to the lectures until I understood every single sentence. What I did to fully understand the lecture is to pause after each sentence, then I'd mimic the tone and speak it out myself. When I noticed new words or phrases that I wasn't familiar with, I would write down multiple assumptions and look it up online to find the right words. In this way, I learned many new words by myself and in my opinion, I remembered them better than the new words that I tried to learn in textbooks as I went through the listen-guess-look up-remember process, which help to consolidate my memories.
At first, it was hard because I got frustrated when I couldn't understand a sentence, but gradually I found myself spending less and less time on understanding the class lectures as I got used to professors' ways of speaking, such as their accents and their preferred words and phrases. In addition, I started to notice reductions in sentences. I found it very difficult to understand some sentences and phrases because of the reductions between words. Reductions could be a great obstacle when it comes to improve listening skills in English. I'm going to talk more about how I noticed the reductions and how to recognize them in my next blog post.
I was also learning how to recognize reductions, a topic for another post.
Shiyi Zhang
Social Media Intern, English at Large
Suffolk University, MA 2014
ENGLISH AT LARGE
Literacy and Learning for Life
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