Foreign Language

Note: I did not realize that we had a blog until I went on Blackboard to find the information on the Case Study. I apologize for the lateness of this blog.

From about eighth grade to the fall semester of my freshmen year, I was constantly in some kind of Spanish class. In high school, I was pushed by my parents to exceed the 2 class requirement, and I ended up taking five classes. Until about Spanish 4, I had done really well learning the language. I did not really need to study, and I did pretty well on everything. The only problem was my shyness got in the way of actually speaking the language. I knew how to speak it, but I just never broke my comfort zone to actually speak it. When Spanish 4 started, things got a bit harder. My Spanish 4 and AP Spanish Language classes were a bit difficult. Spanish 4 was difficult because it involved reading in the language and answering questions. These two tasks were quite difficult for me because my years of not studying caused me to not know a lot of vocabulary. Spanish 5 was a bit easier, but we had to speak the language, which I was not comfortable with. Even with these set backs, I did pretty well overall in my high school Spanish career.
When I came to Elon, my success in Spanish kind of diminished. The biggest part of that was the speaking. There were points in the class where I either had to speak to the class or to the teacher. Luckily, the class part was not as bad since I was usually in a group. Yet, the face to face teacher ones were terrible. I realized towards the end of that class that I expressed myself better in written form than oral form. This drove me to do better on written assignments than my oral assignments. In the end, I got a B in the class.
Since that class my freshmen year, I have not been able to take another Spanish class. I really wish that I could because I really love the language, but my schedule does not allow for it. If I was to take a class now, I think I would do much better with the speaking part, which would help me in the long run. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to take a couple of classes and get back into the language.