As an English major at UCLA, I was required to study a foreign language. Already being a heritage speaker of Romanian, I decided to minor in the language. I felt that I was reasonably proficient, being able to read, speak, and understand Romanian very well. However, I also knew that I struggled with writing in this language, and my grammatical knowledge was not the best. For this reason I decided that the opportunity to study Romanian in an undergraduate setting would help me gain the literacy skills that I lacked.
Learning to speak, read, and write Romanian formally was more difficult than I had first imagined; what I had learned at home was not sufficient. This was due in part to the fact that my parents never corrected me when I made grammatical errors. This inevitably meant that I became accustomed to speaking Romanian very colloquially. Consequently, in the classroom I had to relearn a great deal in order to speak Romanian more properly.
Pronunciation was no issue for me, but learning the different tenses, genders, and conjugations of verbs seemed quite different from how I learned English. However, I did have the advantage of having studied another Latin-based language for three years at school: French. I already had a general idea of how to form sentences and correctly conjugate verbs, but I struggled with trying to forget the more colloquial way of speaking Romanian to which I was so accustomed.
These struggles of mine are not dissimilar to those of others trying to learn English. Thanks to the Internet and Globalization, we are living in a world that is rapidly shrinking, where many people come into contact with the English language on a daily basis. Films and music in English are widely popular throughout the world. Consequently, the English language is not totally foreign to many people. However, although people come into contact with the English language thanks to different forms of media, they are not necessarily being taught English. Thus they are far more likely to pick up phrases and sayings they hear, but without understanding sentence structure and the relevant grammatical rules properly. This is parallel to my own experience with Romanian. By having been instructed in a language with which I am already familiar, I feel that I can identify with some of the struggles and frustrations of others. They too will need to identify the colloquialisms they’ve unwittingly learned and relearn English so as to express themselves more correctly.
By taking part in the MA in TESL program at CSUN, my goal is to gain a much better understanding of language, allowing me to convey that knowledge to my future students, and to help them overcome the struggles and frustrations that come with learning a completely new, or not totally unfamiliar, language. Such is my passion for this that I would also like to build on the knowledge gained in the MA to pursue a doctorate in education leadership.