Blog Post #3 - Kofi

This week's readings were particularly illuminating to me as a second-language French learner. Although I don't currently have any L2 students in the Writing Center, I was able to contextualize the material through my own experiences, since I am taking French this semester. I am something of a Generation 1.5 French-learner, in that I grew up in a household that spoke English, French, and Haitian Creole, and took many years of French in high school and undergrad.

"Possible Transfer-Based Problems" felt very familiar, in that I became aware of how many of my own problems with writing and speaking French stem from phonological and grammatical transfers:

  • the long "I" sound in English (as in "Iowa") is all but absent in French; at the same time, the nasal "R" in French is very difficult for Anglophones to master
  • French is spoken (and written) in a steady, staccato rhythm -- individual words within a sentence are not emphasized by tone but by the addition of a stressed word or pronoun
  • while the grammar structures of both English and French are very similar, the rules governing grammar in French are much more strict. For example, in English the subjunctive tense is used very loosely (i.e. you could get away with saying either "I wish I were rich" or "I wish I was rich", when in French only the former is acceptable).
Although I have no experience with Chinese or other logographic, uninflected languages, I believe that my experience as a second-language learner allow me a certain insight and empathy into the experiences of any L2 students I may teach.

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