Week 9:Situated cognition

Ting Song's picture

Leaning is operating. When I was in college, my scores of English class were very high. I can read difficult articles and my classmates often asked me questions about grammar because I always performed well in English exam. After I arrived in Logan, where every speaks English, I found it was difficult to communicate with people in English, I had to think over and over to select appropriate words, and sometimes people speak so fast that I could not catch them. I was very depressed. But my friends and classmates encouraged me to speak out and not to be afraid of making mistakes. Two month later, after practiced day by day, my English have been improved greatly.

I think every student who comes from non-English speaking country meets this problem. I mean by graduation from my college, I had learned English for more than ten years, but I still could not use it fluently. A sentence in this week’s reading could summarize it, “Learning is a process of enculturation.”  It was practicing that helped me improve my English. I think what I learned in school was not how to use English but the surface of English. I started learning English when I was 9 or 10 years old, from letters to words, from words to sentences, from sentences to articles, it seemed reasonable, but in fact, we were never involved with English culture or relative activities.
Fortunately, this situation has been improved. My nephew in China is 4 years old, he is learning English in his kindergarten, not by reciting letters and words, but by talking with teachers whose mother tongue is English. However, there are still many respects should be improved in our education systems. We should help our students learn real knowledge which would be useful in the future, instead of becoming experts at dealing with exams.
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Submitted by Ting Song on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 8:03pm
Brian B.'s picture

certainly learning a foreign

Submitted by Brian B. (not verified) on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 7:15am.
certainly learning a foreign language is tough. I had the same experience when I went to france the first time. I had been learning french for a while....I think two or three years in high school and two years in middle school, as well as three semesters in college. It was difficult...the first time I went into a grocery store, for example, I didn't know what to do in part because french grocery stores are different....they have different products, a different layout, different units of measurement. When I went to Italy the first time it was a bit different because I did not learn Italian in school but from my ex, who is Italian. I learned it just talking to her, her friends, and her family. And reading Italian newspapers and magazines like "la Stampa"...both paper and on the web. So when I learned Italian I learned it in the Italian culture basically....when I learned french initially I learned it in the american culture.
Jennifer Mathis's picture

First of all, I admire your

Submitted by Jennifer Mathis on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 9:14am.

First of all, I admire your courage.  I think your experience is a perfect example of situated cognition.  We can always learn something, but we might not know we don't completely understand it until we have to use it in real life.  I think teaching is a good example as well.  We all learn everything we need to know to be teachers in our teacher education courses, but we might not really know how to be a teacher until we do it.  I completely agree with you about not becoming experts in exams only.  I think that is a big problem in today's society.  We need to allow our students to learn using real situations and they will learn the content we need them to learn on the way!   

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