How I acquired My Second Language

Many people have a second language; to me my second language is English. I acquired this language the first day I entered school. I wasn’t exposed to this language before, since my parents don’t know English except for a little bit, they got some words from their schools too many years ago.

English language was and still my second language in school, university, jobs and even everyday life. In kindergarten teachers taught me colors, shapes and numbers in English. Also many other simple words like go, eat, drink…etc. They used the grammar translation method as a way of teaching, in which words were mostly translated. In addition to that, they used images to show us the meaning of sentences; this can be under the direct method; which is using tangible things in order to explain something concrete or symbols for abstracts. Otherwise, they used the audio-lingual method as a way of teaching. It was really effective, since by repetition information can stick to our minds and it will not be forgotten unless it has no purpose and not meaningful. I still remember some of the songs that they taught me in kindergarten which was repeated many times everyday morning. Yet I still wasn’t able to make a complete sentence. In my elementary school my teachers taught me how to build up sentences, so I started to know the structure of sentences and compare it to my first language (Arabic), which was totally different. For example, in English the sentence structure is as follow: Subject, verb, and a complement. While in Arabic it may starts with a verb or with a subject. From this I started realizing the difference and I used to think of the way I can build up a sentence by referring back to L1. Later it became automatically, they were coming to my mouth immediately without thinking.

In reality, I loved learning English. So in my intermediate grades I started watching lots of American movies. I tried not to look at the Arabic subtitles down in order to strengthen my language. I also started listening to American songs, which helped me a lot in my fluency and accuracy. My grammar started to be better as well as my accent became much better than before.

As I became older, methods of teaching my second language differs in my school. In class we started to work in groups or in pairs, which is known as the community language learning. I remember the teacher used to pass by each group to see if we were talking together in English and if not our grade will be a zero. This helped me and my classmates a lot since being exposed to the language and using it, is much better than only listening to it and being passive students. Furthermore, presentations and role plays were a very good way in supporting the target language. This was really successful in my high school years. It was as the silent way method. The teacher used to be silent and leave the role for the students to talk and create their own way of learning instead of reading in the classroom and memorizing in homes.

Till now, I am still acquiring my second language and learning new things in it. To me the English language becomes a part of my daily routines. However, I will be teaching it later to my students and to my kids, by using methods that were used before but were effective and methods that are used now a days until we reach our Eclectic Approach that we as teachers need it to create our own philosophy that is always going to be updated according to the time we’re living in.