A LANGUAGE LEARNING JOURNEY

 A  LANGUAGE LEARNING JOURNEY

    Hello everyone! I am Selin. I am an undergraduate student at the Department of International Relations at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. I am in my first year, and I went to the preparatory school at AYBU last year. In this blog, I will tell you how the preparatory school changed my mind about learning a foreign language and how all the wonderful experiences at prep school led me to participate in the Peer Advising Training. Without wasting any time, let's jump into it!

    First things first: I'll try to describe who I was before I came to the university to draw a clear picture of my learning story. I was a successful student in every period of my education life from primary school to high school, but when I started my third year of high school, I realized that my high grades meant nothing to me. What was I studying for? Was I satisfied with my high grades? How was I feeling about my learning? The answer was nothing, not even sadness. I was neither happy nor sad with them. All I felt was boredom. I was so tired of being like my classmates and studying for no reason or for reasons that didn't even belong to me. I tried to find a way out of this boredom. I started watching TED Talks. I realized that most TED talkers are people who cared most about what they wanted and ignored those who tried to intimidate them. They were following their dreams. One day, a really powerful question came to my mind. What was my dream? I talked to my teachers in the hope that they would get to know me and could help me. It didn't work. Maybe it was a bad idea to seek advice from anyone other than myself because no one would know me better than I did. So I decided to take a trip to MY world. I just did what I wanted to do at that moment. If I didn't want to study, I didn't study at all. Therefore, I didn't talk to my friends, and I didn't go out or hang out with my loved ones. I was a bit depressed, but it was beautiful. I discovered myself when I was alone in crowds. And my best friend was on this very well-known video channel. I was watching all the TED Talks find a dream to follow. I wanted to study International Relations, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to study English. Then, while watching TED Talks I thought I may study International Relations in English. At this very point, a new journey to find a reason to learn English began. You may think that studying International Relations is reasonable enough to learn English. True, but studying International Relations in English was not MY idea, so it wasn't personal enough to devote my time and energy to learning English. While I wasn't sure if it was in English, I was sure that studying International Relations was my cup of coffee. So I studied for the university entrance exam and was accepted by AYBU. And, the real story began there!

    Before our lessons started, I joined the messaging group of my classmates and met some of them. Somehow they were able to understand English. I thought that my English was terrible and I had two years to learn English. The preparatory school at AYBU is only one year, but since I had no confidence in my English ability, I accepted to fail from the very beginning. And, unlike my classmates, I didn't even take the first Assessment of General English exam, which was before the new semester started. Therefore, I started prep school directly from the beginner level. I was no longer a member of the messaging group of the International Relations students because I did not want to compare myself to any of my classmates. I knew that some of them passed the exam and started taking department courses, and some others were accepted to A+, B, or B+ levels of the preparatory school of their exam results. I was probably the only International Relations student who started learning English from scratch. That's why I thought it was a good idea not to follow what others were doing, so as not to get discouraged.

    Due to Covid 19, our university decided to provide online education like other universities. I spent a whole year studying English at home. I couldn't attend the classes on the first day of preparatory school. My friend told me how difficult it was to understand our lecturer. I knew my friend's English was better than mine, so I was nervous before attending any class. To calm down, I reminded myself that I had two years to learn English. I didn't want to bother myself with bad thoughts, but I couldn't help thinking my English was horrible. Of course, I did not understand anything in the first month of training, but I was trying to find practical ways to learn the target language, or was it MY target language? I started my language learning journey by first trying to find the reason why I would like to learn the language. Studying at a department that is 100% in English was not a strong reason for me. I was looking for a solid reason that could last for a long time because even if I learned English and used it very well for my studies, it would get rusty after four years of my undergraduate studies. I wanted English to pay off for my hard work, not just for four years, but in all areas of my life. To make it possible, I grabbed at every opportunity, and one opportunity was to join the LAP Clubs.

 

LAP CLUBS IN MY LEARNING JOURNEY

    I first heard about the LAP Clubs from my A-level English lecturer. Then, I attended a session and met my learning advisor there. I liked the way she communicated with us and immediately booked four or six appointments with her for one-to-one sessions. I knew I needed a private place to find my specific reason, and my learning advisor seemed like the right person to ask for help. I was right in my feelings. Having one-to-one sessions with my learning advisor helped me find my reasons and beyond that, I discovered some unique ways of learning. After a while, one after another, I came up with countless reasons, such as communicating with people from all over the world, reading books, writing journals, listening to songs, using English to learn new habits, and many others. In short, I aimed to make English a part of my living, and even further make it my life itself. From that point on, I turned everything in my life into English. My English was bad enough to cause me a lot of trouble, but I didn't give up. I looked up unknown words on online dictionaries and never used translations as long as I got the meaning of the word.

    It was hard at first, as there were too many unknown words and the number of them was increasing in the definitions, and I was spending five to ten minutes on a single word. I don't want to say all those efforts were a waste of time, but I admit I was a perfectionist and thought there shouldn't be any unknown word left I didn't look up in the dictionary. I'm not going to lie: it helped a lot. Being determined and not giving up easily allowed me to take big steps toward my dreams. I used to read beginner-level books out loud every night before I went to sleep. I downloaded and listened to English songs and memorized the ones I liked. I didn't know what to do with my writing ability and my learning advisor gave me the idea to write a gratitude journal. It was basically about writing down everything that I was grateful for. I tried, but I was bored of writing the same things over and over. That's why I changed the concept. One day I was writing about an imaginary situation, one day I was writing about a historical person, but I was writing every day. My learning advisor didn't give me any direct advice, but we could call them suggestions because I was free to play with them and customize them. Upon my advisor's suggestion, I tried to listen to English recordings non-stop, but it didn't last long as I got tired of listening to them nonstop after two days.

    And after a while, my daily studying routine turned into a non-stop study plan because one day while watching a video on YouTube, I found many websites to improve my English speaking skills. My day was starting with watching videos on YouTube, continuing with calls from foreign friends, continuing writing my journal and ending with reading books out loud. I had a little trouble understanding the accents of my foreign friends, but then it became easy as well. I did not stop there, and thanks to English, I gained new habits such as playing the violin and chess. Therefore, English was no longer a subject for me to learn, but a means of living my dream life. I was living my own English and one day my Learning Advisor asked me to attend a program with her. I gladly accepted her offer. It was a national conference in which teachers/advisors participated with their students/advisees. The program aims to obtain valuable insight into the perceptions of English language instructors and learners towards intercultural awareness in preparatory school classes. At the event, instructors and directors of a lot of universities in Turkey were there to share their ideas and hear students' opinions on this issue and discuss how universities could develop methods for teaching English. Then everyone started to introduce themselves in Turkish and when it was my turn, I tried hard to put together Turkish words, but the English ones were getting in the way. I was stuttering and had to apologize and introduce myself in English and complete the entire program using only English. At the end of the program, students were required to make presentations and I was the only person whose presentation was entirely in English. That day, I realized how much English dominated my life and how hard I tried to get rid of Turkish while learning English and this caused me to lose my self-confidence in speaking Turkish. I was spending 90% of my life in English and 10% in Turkish just to communicate with my family. I didn't want to lose my confidence in speaking Turkish, so I tried to find a balance between my English and Turkish timing. But at that time, I was very afraid of losing English, and knowing that it would be very easy to regain my self-confidence in speaking Turkish as it is my mother tongue, I continued to follow my English-based daily routine as before.

NEXT DESTINATION: PEER ADVISING TRAINING

    Finally, I passed the AGE exam, finished prep school, and the summer vacation started. However, I didn't remove English from my life. Whatever I was doing in prep school, I was doing the same things in the summertime. I was watching videos, movies, and TV series talked with my friends, learned the violin, played chess and wrote and read something every day. I don't remember the exact time, but on one of those days, my Learning Advisor mentioned the Peer Advising program and its training. At the time, what the PA program was all about was not clear in my mind, but I really wanted to participate in the program. I did it and I was right to follow my feelings again: another phase in my learning journey started with it.

    In Peer Advising Education, I started learning about Advising in Language Learning. I realized that the methods and strategies I learned in the PA training were what I had already experienced with my LA last year. And now, I can't wait to learn more of these strategies and practice them with my fellow language learner friends.