Name : Shabina

Class Number : 203 WD

My experience of L2 Acquisition – a Success or failure?

L2 Acquisition is the way of learning the second language after your first language has been learned. It is similar to the way people learn their first language. I want to share my L2 Acquisition experience at the age of 14 to the time I graduated from high school in Korea. Considering everything that I had been taught by several teachers back then, unfortunately my L2 Acquisition was a failure. What made me fail?

In the first grade of middle school, I learned how to read and write Alphabet for the first time. There were over 70 students in my class and the total number of the first graders exceeded 1,000; however, the provided English teachers for about 1,000 students were merely two. Although many students’ English skills were not far different from mine, some students could read and write in English well and some couldn’t. But there was no proper Assessing Language Proficiency for checking students’ levels. Therefore, every student should have studied English with the same textbooks in the same classroom with the same teacher, regardless of their levels. Because many students who weren’t even aware of Alphabet needed their teacher’s closer assistance, it was impossible for my teacher to meet my needed help. While teaching English, he couldn’t take care of The Importance Of Rapport with me in the poor condition, so whenever I faced difficult problems such as how to use be-verb, I had to figure out by myself. Furthermore, he failed to pay full attention on the Individual Learner Differences, while the Three Learner Modes was missing in the education system. For instance, he only focused on reading and interpreting sentences without thinking students’ degrees of focus, application, and distraction, while failing to consider who was Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic learner. I was a Visual learner, but my teacher didn’t prepare any visual materials, such as videos or pictures, to help my L2 Acquisition. Classes that missed my needs had lowered my interest in English. One day, I slept on my desk, but my teacher pretended not noticing me. He didn’t want to stall and just keep doing what he was supposed to teach.

Finally, my grades, which remained the top until the third grade of middle school, gradually fell to the mid-average range and the situation became more serious in high school.

It hadn’t changed much. My teacher in the third grade of high school was the worst teacher among my previous teachers. He was almost in his 60s and didn’t try to apply Multiple Intelligence Theory to make classroom dynamic. He only tried to fill his time with boring lectures, which clearly set him in the center of the class and put students aside.

It was clear that he preferred the Traditional teaching than Modern teaching as his classes were filled with teacher-centered instruction, eliminating students’ chances to speak, write, and listen to English freely through teamwork. In fact, as I couldn’t learn Language Skills & Systems completely in school, I still have difficulties in communicating with the native speakers.

The worst thing was that he was a score-oriented person; therefore, he always posted the grade and revealed it to all students, which was an obstacle to me as The Affective Filter Hypothesis and The Monitor Hypothesis in Second Language Acquisition. Whenever I publicly see my low score, my self-esteem and motivation were damaged, while anxiety and stress surged up. To get a good grade, I had to memorize everything that I had learned, without comprehensible input. Consequently, I couldn’t get high marks on the university entrance exam and failed to enter the desired university.

For these reasons, my L2 acquisition was a failure. My previous English teachers were explainers, not involvers or enablers, according to the Effective Teaching. They didn’t build up good rapport with students and their teaching technique were not effective or involving, putting me in trouble in recalling what I learned in class proving Learner Retention Rate. To overcome my weakness about Language Skills & Systems after high school, Certainly I had to spend much money and time to practice English in the Internally Motivated and Self directed atmosphere that the public education didn’t provide as mentioned Research Task : Malcolm Knowles.

In other words, although I put lots of time and effort into school English, I still have a long way to master L2 Acquisition.

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