This week, my Kinyarwanda language study hasn’t so much found me studying new material as it has reviewing “old” material. Of course, part of the reason why is due to the fact that my final self-assessment is approaching, but I have also discovered a new-found love of posting lessons on my language website (https://sites.google.com/a/wisc.edu/learning-kinyarwanda/home-1).
Initially, I viewed my language website exclusively in terms of assignments, which, technically, it still is, but now that I am posting lessons in Kinyarwanda on it, I find that it is much more thrilling. It encourages me to reflect on how best I learn, so I can transmit the information I have better to others. In addition, I find myself thinking about what lesson I would like to post next, and what supplementary information “my students” would require in order to understand it. In turn, it makes me think even more about what to post, how much to post, and in what format, a recurring and productive cycle. Needless to say, it’s all very exciting to me, and I am glad to have had this change of heart, even so late in the semester, as I can continue to prepare for next semester over winter break.
My current attitude is not unlike those of the students described in Katrina Daly Thompson’s article, “Active Learning Through Materials Development: A Project for the Advanced L2 Classroom,” who were each responsible for a content-based website in their target language. One student claimed, “I learned a lot about teaching the language by creating exercises on [the] computer for students of lower levels,” and another commented “I hope our websites will be useful to future…students” (qtd. in Thompson 106). To this I say, so have I, and so do I.
For now, however, I might have to put my website to the side, in order to focus on my self-assessment, but in all honesty, I probably won’t, and that is not an entirely bad thing for my study.
:-)
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