Personal narrative Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Personal narrative - Essay ExampleHe wanted to study English to help with his university coursework. My motivation was more casual. I was simply interested in learning a little spoken Thai and a little about Thai culture. I wasnt interested in learning to read or to write Thai.This narrative will concentrate on the application of Cambournes prerequisites of learning to my language exchange experience. These prerequisites, or conditions of learning, are immersion, demonstration, expectation, responsibility, approximation, employment, result and engagement. As noted by Cambourne, these conditions of learning do not exist in isolation. Rather, these conditions are intertwined. A learners ability to approximate the chump behavior, for instance, may be difficult or impossible absent immersion or demonstration. That said, the eight conditions set forth a clear analytical framework for assessing my Thai-English language exchange. compactness refers to the depth and the comprehensiveness o f the learning or literacy experience. It refers to the extent to which the learner is saturated by the learning experience. It also involves, in important ways, questions of authenticity. In my case, immersion was soberly lacking. As a result, it was difficult to approximate the modeled behavior, the spoken Thai, and my expectations were consequently diminished.My instructor was a native-speaker of Thai. He was well-educated and well-prepared for our lessons. From the point of view of immersion, however, he was my doctor authentic connection to the Thai language. In the background, during our lessons at the coffee shop, there was English music playing on the radio. Everything, from menus to posters on the wall to the conversations at beside tables, was in English. Trying to focus on my Thai lessons was at times a distraction. It seemed external to the physical and cultural environment. In short, the lack of the immersion chemical element affected in a significant way my total lea rning experience. The lack of authenticity and the lack of a broader learning exposure to the learning goals go forth me feeling a bit hopeless about learning to speak Thai.Demonstration Creating Realistic and Practical SituationsThe second condition of learning, the demonstration prerequisite, concerns the modeling of the target behavior. This modeling may be formal or informal. My Thai instructor was rather creative in this respect. He brought magazines to our meetings and used them as belief aids. I recall nonpareil lesson where we studied shopping and prices. He brought a clothing catalogue, a Thai silk catalogue, and a Thai cooking book as teaching aids. He handed me a worksheet in which he had typed English inquiries such as, How much is a coke, with the Thai equivalent written alongside in English script. He modeled the correct pronunciation, made relevant grammatical distinctions, and created a salesperson-customer role-play for the clothing and silk catalogues and a wait er-customer role-play for the Thai cooking book. We took turns playing each of the roles.This was one of the most beneficial aspects of my learning experience. I was able to demonstrate what I had learned in a fairly realistic way. The context in which I was able to demonstrate my knowledge, based upon my instructors models, was also quite practical. My instructor downplayed the theory in his presentation and modeling. As we were