This weekend was action-packed, both for me and for GSE. I had a chance to participate in my first huge GSE Open House event, which ended up being huge and crazy and wonderful. We had about 130 prospective students check out the programs they were interested at GSE. Everyone got a chance to talk to each of our program managers, mingle with some current students, and eating delicious sandwiches. If you were there, you may have met me at the registration table, kind of giddy, because I get a weird sense of satisfaction signing people in and out of things. I discovered this as an undergrad at Penn, when I volunteered to help during move-out at the end of the year and had an unnaturally good time asking people to sign things out. Everyone's got their thing, and if this Linguistics PhD thing doesn't work out, I'll seriously consider working at a front desk or the DMV when I grow up. But back to the Open House. We had representatives from all 8 divisions who held sessions describing the goals and requirements of each program and answered tons of great questions, from courses, to housing, to great places to eat around campus. I got especially excited whenever I saw a new Educational Linguistics prospie enter the building, because just like in my cohort, they all have ridiculously impressive histories and life stories. I remember at my new student orientation, when people started explaining all the different languages they spoke and all the different countries they taught in, I was very intimidated, cuz I was just finishing up my senior year and knew maybe 2.7 languages, if you were generous. But I've learned a lot from them about navigating foreign conversational environments and making people feel comfortable, no matter what their linguistic background. So I was excited for the prospective students to get at least a glimmer of that environment.

The second part of my day was equally hectic and great. I ran out of the open house a bit early since I was hired as the lighting operator for a dance production on campus and the matinee show started at 2pm. During my four years of undergrad, I was involved with a salsa dance troupe on campus called Onda Latina. I choreographed a piece for their show almost every semester and starting my sophomore year, programmed their lights and sound and managed all the production elements. Lighting design became a huge passion of mine and I started getting gigs from other dance and singing groups around Penn. I'm so happy I got a chance to continue doing lighting design as a grad student. Luckily, most of the performance troupes on campus also accept grad students, which provides a nice escape from all the academic hustle during the year. So for all incoming Masters and PhD, I recommend checking those out, especially if you were passionate about performing arts in college.

Last week, when I was on a Bolt Bus going to NY, I ran into a friend who knew I was studying Ed. Linguistics and was intrigued by it, but had never had a chance to ask me any of the questions she had about the topic. So after spending an hour talking about line dancing at her brother's wedding and her trip around Europe, we got on the topic of why she can't speak proper Spanish after studying it for 10 years. She said she had started in middle school, when she was 12, which she thought was pretty early, and even though she could read a bunch, when it came to speaking to service people in Spain last summer, she was mortified. She wondered whether she would be fluent had she started a few years earlier, since she knew children were supposed to acquire new languages intuitively and mostly effortlessly. A few months ago, I probably would've agreed with her, lamented how I forgot all my French after studying it for 6 years as well, and moved on. But because we had just talked about this in my Second Language Acquisition class a couple weeks ago, I got really excited and told her all the stuff that surprised me about learning a foreign language in adolescence. I will now bestow upon you that same rant, because I think its fascinating.
It is generally true that if you learn a foreign language after the "critical period" which is said to occur somewhere around puberty, you will not acquire a native-like pronunciation in that language. There are some crazy exceptions though, like this woman who began learning Japanese at the age of 14 and is almost indistinguishable from a native speaker. But generally, either your native phonology interferes, or you just lose the motivation to acquire perfect pronunciation, because why, if you're already understood. There's also a difference between foreign language and second language learning contexts. The first means you are studying a language in a country that doesn't speak that language, and the second means you study a language in a classroom, but then also use it outside, because the country speaks that language. What I found out in class was that adults tend to learn language faster and more thoroughly in the classroom, because they have developed cognitive and analytical skills that help them learn patterns that children are less likely to know. So in the first year of classroom learning, adults perform better than children. In a second language setting, children tend to catch up and surpass adults after the first year, because they learn implicitly from their environment outside of class. But, in a foreign language setting, sometimes they never catch up, because they are receiving the same level of input. This blew my mind, because it completely displaces the myth that learning a language earlier is always better. So, my friend could have started learning Spanish at age 7, and still not been able to speak a word, because she didn't have prolonged input from native speakers and no motivation to achieve fluency outside of the classroom.
So then you wonder, with schools that are severely under-budgeted *cough cough* (Philly), is it better to start foreign language instruction as early as elementary school, or can it be pushed back to middle school/high school?

A few days ago, I was reading this article in The Atlantic called “Forgetting and Remembering Your First Language.” In it, Olga Khazan talks about how she returns to Russia after 25 years and is struck by how much Russian she’s forgotten when she tries to hold conversations with family members and train conductors. The idea of forgetting your first language struck me as absolutely terrifying. When I was about 9, and we had skipped a summer of going to Poland, cuz we had to pay for my Communion that year, I noticed myself forgetting some very basic words in Polish. Things like “butterfly” or “umbrella” only showed up in English when I was struggling to tell my mom about my day without scaring her that I had forgotten her culture. I believe that memories are very strongly tied to the language in which they are encoded, which means that if I lost my ability to speak Polish, much of the authenticity in those memories would be lost as well. In other words, for me, losing a first language would be like slowly losing a past identity. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. After years of speaking to my parents only in Polish, I still consider myself fluent.

However, there’s a more subtle attrition that Khazan talks about in her article. It’s partial language attrition that comes out when you’re trying to express a thought or opinion that you cultivated in your dominant languge, and struggle to find the words in which to represent it in your first language. Khazan says,

“Eventually I’d take the linguistic back seat, allowing others around me to talk as I nodded politely along. Do I have an opinion about something? My opinion is “da.”

This vocab-delimited apathy led to some uncomfortable outcomes. Touring a church with a family friend, I asked what a certain icon represented. He seemed surprised I didn’t know.

“I don’t know, I’m not a believer,” I said, without thinking about how many complicated sentences of explanation this admission would prompt.

“What do you mean?!” he asked, aghast.

“Surely you don’t think the earth was created from nothing? Surely you see that there’s a divine mind behind all of this!” he said, sweeping his hands past the brightly painted walls, which depicted saints mid-torture.

I scrambled for the words for “Big Bang” or “evolution” before realizing it was hopeless.

I shrugged and smiled, as if to say, “you’re probably right.”

There are times in Poland when I have no idea how to express my opinions on education, diversity, feminism, and most things because none of the relevant words exist in my vocabulary and even if they did, I’d have no idea what they mean if embedded in a Polish cultural context. In my Second Language Acquisition class, we were talking about how language acquisition is just the flip-side of language attrition, but for bicultural bilinguals, it can definitely apply to cultural attrition as well. It’s interesting to think about if you lose touch with a culture, does your version of its language become outdated?

The Economist's Prospero blog weighs in on the different languages/different personalities debate. Will probs end up being my dissertation topic sometime down the line:  http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingualism

Hey guys! Thought that for my first post, I'd talk a little bit about what got me into language and ultimately, into GSE.

I was born in Poland and came to the U.S. with my parents at the age of one. We moved into a very Polish community in Brooklyn, NY and have lived there ever since. Because nearly all of my neighbors and cousins in Brooklyn spoke Polish, I was not exposed to a monolingual English environment until kindergarten at age 5, which is when I started transitioning to English as the main language of communication with my peers. At some point, during my visits to Poland every summer, I started paying attention to how my personality seemed to change along with the language I was speaking at the time, and was fascinated by the shifts in humor and affect I associated with English and Polish.

I studied Linguistics and Comparative Literature at UPenn because I wanted to understand how the structure of language and the structure of stories could be related. I was interested in how the syntax of a certain language could affect the way you structure the world around you, so I took many descriptive and theoretical Linguistics courses in order to learn how to conceptualize language. What I ended up delving most deeply into, however, was language acquisition. I studied Hindi for three years and began TA-ing Beginning Hindi courses my sophomore year. I also served as the Program Coordinator for a summer intensive Hindi class for high school students at UPenn. In my experience with learning and teaching Hindi, I became more passionate about new teaching strategies, using metalinguistic discussion in the classroom, and issues surrounding Less Commonly Taught Languages.

I applied to GSE because I wanted to explore Linguistics in a way that wasn’t merely descriptive. And because I wanted to see how theoretical Linguistics could be applied in the classroom to make students curious about the versatility and creativity of language. I plan to pursue a Ph.D. studying bilingualism and cognition to explore a question I have been trying to answer for years: what changes in your perception of the world when you inhabit more than one language?