BLOG 8 - A Subject You Enjoy Studying This Semester (or any semester)

Last entry! This week we will be working on our last entry. How exiting has been this journey seeing your different posts, comments and reactions around this blogging initiative. I truly believe you've improve your language skills along with your confident using English. This week, again a career related topic, an entry where you describe a subject you've enjoyed the most. We all have our favourite one, for different reasons, or just we enjoyed it while learning, I personally have got my own preferences, load with many fun memories . Please remember, be creative and write, write and write!

Entry's features:

For the present task, you need to write 170 words. Pay attention to misspellings, grammar errors and vocabulary. Do not forget to post three (3) comments on your classmate’s posts and one (1) on mine as well (25 words as a minimum!) Try to use the structures we have learned in previous lessons and all the English you know. DO NOT USE GOOGLE TRANSLATOR TO DO YOUR ENTRY. I truly encourage you to go for some WOW Words! (the WWP!) Give it a crack and good luck on your assignment! :)

Intercultural communication

When first came across this subject, it was part of the academic offering on the pamphlet the programme suggest for our second semester while doing my MA on Applied Linguistics. I wanted to get involved all those aspects of interrelating with people from different both linguistic and cultural backgrounds. My idea was to get to know other realities and how to relate among them. After studying several weeks, doing a lot of academic readings and researching between many academic fonts I was ready to put into practice how it would be to be in multilingual setting teaching English...

I attended a demo class at a public school in the outskirts of Doncaster (a near by city). The school looks just any school in any country...however, inside it was another thing. Kids from different countries, languages, clothing, culture and so on...

There were boys from Pakistan speaking Punjabi, some Wu Chinese speaking kids, some Russian girls, a lot of Mandarin Chinese speakers, Korean, Albanian, Algerian, a French Canadian boy, two Latvian girls, four Mexicans and three Portuguese kids among others...

I was meant to teach an English lesson on 'Food and Prepositions of place'...I had many difficulties trying to get the students to work...I didn't know why...One kid from Spain said in his Iberic Spanish...'Maestro, creo que debeís aclarar qué entendéis por cocina' another student commented 'we do not use that word since we are Muslims'...and so on!

After an hour of class I learnt that language could be a great bridge that unify peoples. Another thing learnt, it was that language could be one of the greatest barriers for people to understand each other!