Blog post 5 - A subject you have enjoyed studying this year

 

Write about your favorite subject this term. 

Include:

• Name of subject
• Describe what you do in classes
• Mention the main contents you have seen
• Explain why you like the subject

Word Count: 180
Make comments on 3 of your classmates' posts + a comment on the teacher's post.

I took a postgraduate course on Second Language Acquisition a couple years ago. I took this course online through the Institute of Education at the University of London so my classmates were from all over the world from Japan to Saudi Arabia to Canada. The course involved a great deal of reading and then every week we either had a project or some kind of question to discuss in a forum. We explored a variety of topics such as: child language acquisition, cross linguistic influence, cognitive perspectives, individual differences in motivation, etc. 

What I liked about the course was that it was a nice combination of psychology and linguistics. I’m interested in how our brains work especially on how we learn.  As I mentioned in a previous blog post, this course is where I discovered Zoltán Dörnyei when we analyzed motivation in language learning. In fact, I wrote one of my assignments on that aspect of second language acquisition. I also discovered Lev Vygotsky who is known for his studies in learning theory. One of my favourite quotes “A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.”