by Julia Gardner
All Wesleyan students remember how tough the college application process was– and the various ways we spent our time avoiding it. Ting Tsai, now a sophomore, calls language learning her 16 year-old self’s own way of “procrastinating without procrastinating.” Growing up in Taiwan, Ting (any pronouns) has always spoken Hakka and Mandarin Chinese, but after discovering a love of language-learning early, she studied Japanese and Italian outside of the classroom and took both Spanish and English at school.
At age 16, however, faced with college applications, Ting took on a new language: German. Soon, she found she was studying for up to an hour a day. As she self-studied German, Ting discovered that it was both possible and fun to learn a language independently. Now that she’s at Wesleyan– safely on the other side of the dreaded process– she’s using her independent-study experiences to support fellow language learners by leading her own student forum, “How to Learn a Language.”
Ting was inspired to start her student forum by the community of international students she connected with over a shared love of language learning. These friendships gave her the idea of creating a structured environment in which language learners, especially those studying a language not taught at Wesleyan, could connect and collaborate.
“While most language classes are very top down, I wanted my class to be a space of mutual support where we could learn from each other,” she told me. Drawing on her own language learning experiences as well as consulting with her faculty sponsor, Professor Hafiz FazaleHaq, Ting focuses on teaching students engaging methods to build into their self-study routines. The class includes learners of eight different languages, some taught of which are taught at Wesleyan and others not, and a wide variety of levels, but Ting finds ways to design lessons that can work for every learner in her classroom.
The student forum balances consistent work on projects with exploring a creative new method of practice every week. Over the course of the semester, students build a flashcard deck to practice vocabulary using Ting’s software of choice, Anki. They also complete weekly journals on a variety of topics to hone reading and writing skills, which they then correct using online grammar checkers. In addition, students engage with their target language and culture through a new medium each week; past lessons have included learning from Youtube videos and children’s books.
All of her students are there because of their passion for language learning, but Ting has been pleasantly surprised by just how motivated and engaged all of them are. She says that she would consider having the student forum again if she has time; for now, she’ll be busy next semester with her Psychology and Interdisciplinary Arts Management majors, while hard at work on her newest language, Arabic. In the meantime, her main advice to language learners is to find ways to connect to their interests through the medium of their target language. Through doing things like watching TV, listening to podcasts, and reading books, you’re not only motivated to improve your language skills, but also gain cultural context– and of course, finding a great community of language-learning friends never hurts.
