My name is Alex, I live with my family in Busan, South Korea where I serve as staff elder for a small international church.

I have four small children, my passions, dreams and hopes revolve around keeping them alive one day at a time.

I also enjoy coding (another type of language) and I would quite like to make my own computer game one day.

2) What do you want to accomplish from this course?   

I have a few reasons for taking this course.

First, I am learning Korean. I have lived in Korea for 6 years, have passed my citizenship exam and have a decent level of functional Korean for day-to-day life, but would still say I am a long way from fluency.

Second, my children are growing up bilingual (English + Korean), and learning Mandarin Chinese on the side. I hope to help them develop good language skills (especially English given they are not growing up in a native English environment)

Third, a decent number of our church members are English teachers, I hope this course will help me relate to them and their day-to-day work.

Fourth, for around half of our church members English is not their mother tongue, I want my teaching and preaching to be relevant to as many of those listening as possible.

Fifth, I teach a couple of hours per week of English to kindergartners on the side for supplementary income. I hope to teach English better myself.

3) What questions do you have about second language acquisition? 

1. How can I improve from 'functional' to 'fluent'?

2. What are the best tools/practices for learning a language?

Specifically, I want to see if and how I can use AI to improve my Korean speaking and listening. My speaking and listening are passable, I can hold daily conversations about life, admin, family, travel etc. but often miss things and struggle in deeper more niche topics and in group conversation settings. Most of my work life and home life is in English, so I don’t have loads of opportunity to speak Korean on a daily basis. Most of my speaking and listening improvement has come through 1.5 hours a week with a Korean tutor, who is very good but not cheap. Throughout this project I hope to get a feeler and explore whether and how I can use AI as a Korean tutor or at least conversation partner to improve my speaking and listening longer term.

This week I began by simply trying to have a 30 minute conversation with ChatGPT in Korean. I was amazed that ChatGPT can hold an actual live conversation in Korean (I have used ChatGPT as a sort of internet search engine, idea generator in the past, but only through typing and never had a conversation even in English with it before).

We talked a bit about the weather, the meaning of life and my hobbies. In future weeks I want to explore ChatGPT’s capabilities as a tutor.

From this course, I am seeking to learn more about what it is like to be an English language learner. I am excited to learn effective teaching techniques. I think through this course it will be helpful to someone be in the shoes of someone who is learning a second language. I hope to gain a greater understanding of what it may be like for someone whose first language is not English to come to an English-speaking country. I feel that this is important as it grows our compassion for sisters and brothers who are not from our country. I also feel this course can help me gain more knowledge in the classroom setting. Through learning how English is acquired I feel I will be able to better help my students in ESL classes.

A question I would have regarding second language acquisition would be “Why are some languages simple for some people to master but harder for others?” While I understand a large part of this may be how people’s brains are wired, I am curious as to if there are other factors that contribute.

Hello everyone! My name is Michael, but I actually have always gone by my middle name – Dylan. I'm originally from Jacksonville, Florida, but have lived in North Carolina since January 2021. I have always enjoyed playing and watching sports and games. We have a closet full of board games, but we often don't have time to play them these days because my wife and I are busy caring for our two young children (they're the best). Also, I really enjoy coffee and am always looking for new roasts or ways to brew it.

2) What do you want to accomplish from this course?   

I want to gain a greater understanding of what sorts of methods seem to work well for someone looking to learn a new language. I have always been fascinated by language and culture, but I only speak English and haven't been able to travel as much as I would have liked. But, gaining an understanding on the methods, motivational factors, and cultural factors that play a role in SLA seems like a great place to start. While I may not be able to travel much, I can certainly make an effort to learn another language. Specifically, the Raleigh area is incredibly diverse and we don't necessarily have to travel to the nations in order to reach the nations because many of them are already here. One last thing, I think it would be incredible to learn the most widely spoken language in the world: Chinese, Spanish, Arabic. That's a future goal.                      

3) What questions do you have about second language acquisition? 

When learning a second language, are the methods fairly equal no matter the language of study? For instance, if we were to compare someone learning Spanish and someone learning Chinese, would they each benefit the same amount from reading and listening exercises? I assume the answer isn't so simple, and that an English speaker would have a much easier time with something like Spanish due to the familiar alphabet and it being more recognizable in the Western world.

My name is Olivia, and I am a senior at Judson College. I'll be graduating this December with a BA in English! Afterwards, I hope to start teaching and am looking at teaching English at a Christian girls' school! I am passionate about quality education that creates lifelong learners and equips students with tools to be independent learners. I also believe that teachers have a wonderful opportunity to build a culture of Christ-centered discipleship in the classroom by being a godly role model who invests in the students.

2) What do you want to accomplish from this course?           

I love ESL and have gotten to volunteer with refugee children in elementary school with a local ministry doing ESL and tutoring. I would love to be equipped with tools to be a better tutor for these kids! I would also like to be more prepared as a teacher to better assist any students I may have in the future who are learning English as a second language.                          

3) What questions do you have about second language acquisition? 

As someone who really struggles with learning languages but has a desire to study them, what are some tips for successful language learning?

My goal is to see if ChatGPT can imitate my Korean language tutor in doing the following: Giving a structured lesson, encouraging and pushing the conversation in such a way as to explore new vocabulary and grammar, being able to identify and correct flaws in my grammar, pronunciation or use of words.

Unfortunately after much trying it proved very hard to get ChatGPT to do any of those things. ChatGPT seemed very reluctant to plan a lesson, or to offer any criticism. It refused to take the lead continuously saying “let’s start learning” without actually providing any starting point or input. It was very frustrating with me basically pleading with it to teach me something, only for it to say again “let’s start learning”. Similarly it was very reluctant to provide any negative feedback.

Perhaps it is a limit of ChatGPT, or perhaps I am not using it correctly, but it seems that it won’t be a good language tutor unfortunately. I think next week I will return to seeing how it works as a conversation partner and see if that can help advance my Korean.

My name is Lucy and I am a senior at Judson College. Lordwilling, I will be graduating this upcoming spring with a BA in English. Some of my passions include analyzing and discussing literature, writing my own stories, travelling, playing volleyball, and learning about foreign cultures. I also enjoy having discussions with people about just about anything. As far as my future dreams and hopes, I'm not exactly sure what the Lord has planned but I am currently exploring the idea of teaching English in a foreign country as well as a few other options. Over the summer, I was able to have the chance to interact with people from many cultures around the world and became passionate about helping them hone their English skills in addition to learning another language myself.

2) What do you want to accomplish from this course?

From this course, I am hoping to better gauge what skills I would need to develop and work on to become better prepared to teach English as a career. I never thought I would seriously consider teaching English, but I am hoping that this course could give me some direction on choosing a career path for good. I am also both intrigued and intimidated by the idea of teaching myself a language that is completely unfamiliar to me. I believe it will test me in new ways I have not encountered before and allow me to better understand the struggles of those who are trying to learn English as their second language.

3) What questions do you have about second language acquisition?

I'm actually really curious about which language in the world is the most difficult to learn and why.

In my L2 learning, however, this immersive experience has been something I’ve definitely lacked. My study methods have typically involved tools like Duolingo. While this is better than nothing, it often feels too predictable and doesn’t provide the kind of feedback I think is necessary for continued growth. On top of that, the new charging system makes the app nearly useless unless you’re willing to pay for premium.

Because of this, I’ve been looking for other ways to immerse myself more fully in Spanish. A few ideas I have right now include: changing the default language on my phone to Spanish, watching more videos in Spanish with subtitles (something like Bluey since I know it so well and the language shouldn’t be too advanced at first—thanks, kids!), and making a greater effort to interact with my Spanish-speaking friends.

I’m hopeful that these practices will help me create a more immersive and productive learning environment, because I truly believe that the more exposure we have to our target language, the better. ¡Adiós!

This week, I continued my language learning focusing on Italian and using Duolingo. Most of my learning this week was very repetitive with vocabulary words and sentence structure. I felt that I have not learned much new information in comparison to last week, but I have become more confident in what I do know. So far, I have learned how to greet people, how to introduce myself, tell where I am from and use basic language to describe a family.

As far as second language teaching methods, I am equally familiar with all of them. I do not know much about each of them but have heard the terms used.

So far, I've mainly been using Duolingo since it keeps language learning relatively easy and simple by splitting it up into small lessons. However, I've also been keeping in contact with my friends in Germany and have been able to learn some other small things from them along the way. As far as how my experience has been going, I would say that overall, a lot of the words I've learned so far do not seem too far off from English and the sentence structures have been relatively simple. There are a couple things that surprise me every once in a while, but I believe it hasn't proved too difficult yet because I'm just starting out. While Duolingo has aided me in knowing vocabulary and spelling, I would like to practice listening and speaking more regularly with my friends in Germany if possible. We plan to keep in consistent contact and so I'm hoping that will help hone my German skills.

The most difficult part about second language acquisition is the constant mental translation the student has to do as they are speaking. When I try to speak in a different language, I think of what I want to say in my first language and then try to translate that into the second language. This process can be frustrating and exhausting sometimes, but it an also be so exciting when you find the right words to express your thoughts.

In terms of teaching methods, I have had experience with all, although I was not familiar with their proper terms until this class.

Based on the reading I did this week and the webinar (and also based on the fact that neither ChatGPT nor Gemini seem to be very good at formulating and running a lesson) I decided to focus on a Community Language Learning approach, focussing on interesting conversation. We talked about my UK trip and what I’ve been doing on it.

I also asked it to teach me some “four character Chinese phrases” (Korean phrases of four characters, based on Chinese). It could do this quite well, but wasn’t so good at encouraging me to practice using them. Still I could see potential in AI for being a teacher or reference in this sense.

The main benefit I am experiences so far from my attempts to use AI is in simply using the language. If I can find interesting conversation topics, and if the AI doesn’t become too frustratingly repetitive then I think AI can be a good tool for getting me simply using the language more, which I think is my main need, and also seems to be the main suggestion of the readings.

What it doesn’t do well so far is naturally adjust to my level and push me in areas of weakness, or introduce and help me practice new vocabulary/grammar in a natural way like my Korean tutor does so well.

Overall this week was slightly better, but still quite frustrating and therefore not the ideal conversation partner. Having done a little research online I might try and see if I get better results with the ChatGPT paid version next week.

I have tried out the free versions of a few different AIs and language apps with AI features and have decided to try going deeper with PingoAI.

It gives options for different role-play scenarios and even allows you to create your own scenarios. For example I created a scenario to mimic my friday evening football club (the main place I speak Korean in the week as all the other players are Korean), and the conversation was actually quite realistic to how a normal conversation I might have there.

Once again I am discovering that the most important factor is that the conversation is interesting and realistic - perhaps my ultimate conclusion here will be that I just need to go out and talk more Korean to Koreans.

However the reason I might not fully reach taht conclusion is that the app also gives feedback on your conversation, which is what I am looking for (and which ChatGPT and Gemini refused to do). This will hopefully be what makes an AI tutor worthwhile so I can actually learn, correct and improve.

I think I will try and do the pro version of PingoAI for a month and see how that goes next week or the week after.

I tend to underutilize Intrapersonal and Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligences and overuse Linguistic Intelligence. This is why it's important to me to practice speaking Czech aloud as I was studying this week.

Linguistic hospitality is a very important subject to cover especially as believers. It is an impactful way to love our brothers and sisters who are from other language groups.  I have been shown linguistic hospitality through the means of my Spanish ministry at church. I attended one of their services one week and they were so welcoming and patient with me. I even was able to take with a couple who I had known from ESL. I felt this was meaningful in multiple ways. I was able to show them that I care about their language and am eager to learn just as they are eager to learn English. I think this is related to “speaking beauty into the chaos” because it can seem like chaos when you are interacting with many different language groups. However, linguistic hospitality can call some of that chaos and make people feel more at home.

I think that I overutilize or focus on Linguistic Intelligence and Interpersonal Intelligence in contrast to Intrapersonal Intelligence and the other types. This week, I especially worked on Interpersonal Intelligence by forming and answering questions in my second language through a conversation format. While this was helpful, in the future I'm sure it would be even more helpful to include the other types of intelligence in my weekly practice sessions so I can have an even more balanced learning environment.

·       Please provide specific language learning activities/examples to support your response!

Using Gemini was a very stressful experience. The fact that it continually misinterprets my questions and repeats itself was very stressful and made me want to give up. This is reinforcing in my mind that this is not the right tool. Hopefully when I switch to PingoAI or another similar app (which are designed with fun language learning in mind) I will have better results. It is interesting that in my reading about different AI and app tools many people both praise and criticize the ‘gamified’ learning apps like Duolingo. I haven’t used Duolingo, but in the past I used Memrise for vocab. I definitely enjoyed the gamey feel and I think it really did help my vocab. A year or two ago I switched to Anki because Memrise seemed to stop supporting custom vocab lists. Anki is a lot less gamey and I definitely enjoy it less.

When I compare my experience of Gemini to my usual use of Korean (currently outside of Korea this is limited to the novel I am reading in Korean and the audiobook I am listening to in Korean), those other means are much more enjoyable, and low stress. Because I am engaged by the stories in the respective media it doesn’t really feel like I am studying when I do those things, it is more for pleasure. Reading a Korean book and listening to a Korean audiobook are helping improve my reading and listening skills, but I don’t think they are helping my grammar development, vocabulary and speaking skills, which is what I’m trying to use Gemini for. Hopefully I will have joy when I start using PingoAI next week!

For those who might be interested these are links to two recent blog posts doing a deep review of various AI language learning tools which I found very helpful:

https://tomstakesaitools.substack.com/p/ai-powered-language-speaking-practice
https://tomstakesaitools.substack.com/p/part-2-ai-powered-language-speaking

·       What is one factor that associates with your own language learning success?

·       What is one factor that impedes your own language learning?

I was unable to watch the video provided, so I will choose what I guess will be two factors based on the reading instead.

One factor I consider has benefited my language learning success has been confidence, not being afraid to look silly or make mistakes. In general living in another country, especially such a homogeneous country as South Korea you have to have a certain level of self-confidence or not caring what others think of you (hopefully in a good way). For example I walk down the street and am the only foreigner, when I attended civil defence training I was picked out of a crowd of 100+ Korean men to demonstrate CPR, I’m the only non-Korean attending my son’s music recital, I’m the only one not laughing at a joke in my football team because I missed the punchline. If these things bother you then it will be very hard to put yourself in natural Korean environments. Thankfully I’m relatively unphased by these situations and am happy to press on through them, which I think has been a factor helping me pursue language study. In terms of my AI learning, and in general the benefit of an AI language partner, there is no fear of making a mistake at all, so there is great potential there for AI to be a useful tool.

One factor I think which impedes my language learning is opportunity for using Korean. In spite of living in South Korea and in spite of the various scenarios I listed above I don’t actually get to use Korean all that much. Currently all of my studies are in English, 90% of my home life is in English, and 90% of my church work is in English (being at an international church). Roughly 50% of my social life is English, so the main times for using Korean are in day-to-day environments (eg. At the shops) and with my Korean friends (who I don’t see all that often being rather busy), and leisure (reading Korean novels before bed, listening to Korean audiobooks in the car). Based on my experience so far, if I start using AI longer term I think it will be a sort of 10-15 minute/day bonus-practice to keep me from getting rusty, rather than boosting my Korean significantly. That being said, in the TalkPal app I was using today it did have some helpful tools for practicing what to say in certain scenarios. I think going through those drills in regular but small doses will help make my Korean a bit more natural.

I am definitely Left-brain dominant. For example when using the TalkPal app this week I preferred the tasks where I had to listen to and reconstruct a sentence from word-blocks, over another task where I had to match a word like ‘optimization’ (in Korean) to a picture.

I think I have a relatively high ambiguity-tolerance. I don’t mind knowing exactly what is going on. For example I am reading a novel in Korean a few pages each night, but I often don’t understand vocabulary words or even whole sentences. Whereas some people might feel the need to look up each word, I’m happy just to guess the meaning from context, or press on anyway assuming the overall story will become clear even if I miss a detail.

For reflective versus impulsive, I think that I am somewhere in the middle. I do sometimes prepare a phrase in my head before speaking it (reflective), but at the same time in the middle of a conversation I’m happy to go ahead speaking knowing I will make mistakes.

For visual/audio/kinesthetic, I think perhaps I am mostly kinesthetic. I haven’t reflected on this distinction much, but I have noticed that I’m not very good at picking up visual and audio things, so perhaps I am more kinesthetic! I am teaching my children a little bit of Mandarin, and I’ve noticed that whilst I don’t give them audio or visual clues I do get them to act out the meaning of words whilst saying them, so perhaps subconsciously that is my preferred learning style.

Another thing to add is that of the visual/auditory/kinesthetic learning models, I definitely feel as though I learn best through visualization. For example, on some of the flash cards that I’ve used for Spanish, I’ve tried to add useful images to further ingrain them in my mind. For instance, on my flash card for “to throw” (“lanzar”), I added an image of Trey Lance (a not very good NFL quarterback).

Also, I would say I fall more on the ambiguity tolerant side of the equation. For example, I was reading a comic with my daughter and there were plenty of times where I had to make guesses as to what the book was saying whenever it used words I didn’t recognize. Lastly, I highly recommend reading a comic with your kids. It truly was a wonderful experience for us both to be surprised as we read the story together.

I discussed with ChatGPT how in South Korean hierarchy is expressed and reinforced through language, as there are different names and different speech forms used for speaking to those of different status and age.

We also talked about how Korean inherently expresses collectivism versus individualism, in Korean even when I’m by myself I will speak about ‘our family’ or ‘our children’. It can even be used in which technically and grammatically to use ‘our’ is incorrect. For example a single child can say ‘our parents’, when grammatically or contextually that makes no sense. I will speak about ‘our wife’ to refer to ‘my wife’. These break the ‘rules’ of grammar, even in Korean, and yet they are culturally appropriate.

In the bigger picture of my language learning project I’ve been thinking about whether a Large Language Model can be a meaningful conversation partner or language teacher. It can certainly teach me things about the language, but can I have the relationship with it that is required? To be an effective teacher it must have a culture it must have a personality and a community. Perhaps part of the reason I’m struggling with using AI as a tool is that it has no personality. Normally the first question I would ask is ‘how have you been?’ But immediately that is a fake question and the answer will be fake At best an AI will be simulating a human conversation partner, taking examples of communication from the internet and imitates those. In one sense as an LLM it is the pure form of language, relying purely on language input, however it misses the context and culture. In order for it to work I also have to pretend it is a human, especially given the lack of non-verbal communication.

So far AI and LLMs seem to be a bit like a textbook or reference book, good for learning some technical points of the language, and perhaps even for speaking practice to an extent, but without the human element and relationship that you get with a real conversation partner or teacher it feels lacking and empty.

Up to this point, Duolingo has not included any cultural education, but I do have some knowledge of Czech culture prior to starting learning the language from my cousins. My family and I also got to visit them a year ago, and we really had to opportunity to experience Czech culture firsthand. Many people recognized that we (along with my cousins) were not native Czech speakers, so they would sometimes speak in English. But for that week, we were mostly surrounded by the Czech language. We learned a few phrases (we learned how to order food at a restaurant!) and got to experience a church service in Czech. Although I did get to experience some of the culture during our visit, it was not near enough to better aid in the study of the language. It would be useful for platforms like Duolingo to also provide cultural instruction, weaving it into the lesson. Culture is woven into the language and affects the phrases used and the way you would express thoughts, so understanding the culture is very important.

Here are a list of common ‘mistakes’ based on contrasts between Korean and English I make which I’m aware of:

Using overly formal language with children. Because most of my learning/usage is with older people, don’t have as much experience with younger children so I default to formal language. This is better than the opposite mistake, speaking informally to adults, but it is still a bit unnatural. As my children get older and I meet more Korean children I’m naturally adapting though, it will just take some time.

Forgetting/getting words mixed up. This happens a lot! Korean is said to have a lot of words compared to other languages (I don’t know why!) Many Korean words have two syllables, especially words of Chinese origin. With vocab I’m not very familiar or I can only vaguely remember I’m likely to get the order of the syllables wrong. I think I will be studying vocab the rest of my life…!

There are certain bits of pronunciation I still struggle with. Often I stumble over Korean’s indirect subject markers. These are very unnatural to an English speaker’s tongue, and especially if speaking quickly my tongue gets twisted.

Also recently I’ve found people misunderstand when I say the Korean word for eight (‘pal’) they think I’m saying four (‘sah’). In my mind and when I say it to myself these are completely different sounds, but for some reason I must be saying eight very wrong…! It still baffles me.

Once a Korean friend said my Korean intonation is off. I still haven’t worked out what he meant by this, even when asking my Korean teacher! I think I haven’t really worked on intonation in Korean so probably speak most things in an odd way.

Describe what you think you can "do," in your language, in these domains. 

-Czech uses gendered nouns that each require their own article beforehand that changes on the gender, but English does not have gendered nouns and the articles are do not change based on that. This difference is the hardest one to master because knowing the gender of the noun relies on nothing by memorization of the nouns, as the noun endings are not always consistent.

-Czech and English actually use a very similar alphabet, except that Czech utilizes different accents and marks above a few letters. Learning which particular mark belongs in which particular place can prove a challenge and requires memorization and familiarity with the sounds those special characters make.

-Czech and English also use a lot of the same sounds, but the letters used to indicate those sounds vary.

-The construction of Czech and English sentences are surprisingly very similar, although there is a bit more flexibility within the Czech language. It is helpful to know and use those variations when possible.

Errors

-I think my biggest holdup is not having someone who speaks Czech to practice conversation with me. At this point I can really only read Czech but an not very adept at carrying a conversation.

As for errors, I honestly haven’t done enough speaking to accurately assess the types of errors that I may be making. It is my suspicion that I would likely make local errors that could be understood but aren’t grammatically accurate. I know that I also have a tendency to follow English sentence structure more often than I should, especially if I’m not confident in the message I’m trying to convey. 

Discourse features:

Topic markings (은/는):  I think I get these right generally, but I’m sure I miss them or use subject markings instead sometimes when it would be unnatural. Interestingly my previous Korean tutor encouraged me to not worry about these and just pick them up naturally over time, which I think I have.

Subject/object markings (이/가/을/를):  As above.

Sentence endings: I am very comfortable with the different levels of formality in Korean now

Connective words: I think I still don’t use these fully fluently.

Conversation rules:

Deferring to elders: Generally I do this well.

Indirect language: for example not directly disagreeing, but using softer expressions. I think this is an area I still find unnatural. It goes beyond just getting the words right, but is a deeper way of thinking.

Pragmatic conventions:

Adjusting speech level: I feel comfortable with using correct honourifics in the correct context.

Modesty: I have been told I’m very well mannered in Korean

Reflecting on these areas I think my main areas for improvement are in forming more complex sentences with joining words/phrases, and practicing the use of softer/indirect language to get more comfortable with it.

Ultimately, I am dissatisfied in the categories mentioned in the prompt. To this point, I do not feel as though I have learned enough to hold any sort of conversation outside of basic greetings. The bulk of my studies this semester have been over vocabulary, text books, and a couple of comic books. I have done a poor job of devoting time to intentional listening exercises. Also, my speaking has been pretty much non-existent to this point (unless you count a few attempts at journaling in Spanish). It is my goal to try and initiate a conversation in Spanish prior to the end of the semester to practice what I have learned in live discourse.

I am getting better at recognizing verb forms and tenses, but still have a fair amount of errors in my comprehension and production. Despite these shortcomings, I still feel very motivated to continue learning. Overall, the language is still like a scattered puzzle, but it is exhilarating watching the pieces come together.