Week 12 Sending in your article for review

Reposted from Lost in the Maze of Languages

Updates on Week 12

It always feels very awkward to start a posting after a long absence, and this is actually one of the reasons why I haven’t been able to write for so long. So I will just get straight to the point. This posting is to update on the progress on my 12 week journal writing project and what on earth I have been up to lately.

First thing first, about my Writing your journal article in 12 weeks project. I finished revising my article thanks to constructive and insightful feedback from my colleagues and sent it for review almost exactly 8 weeks ago. I think I have passed the journal editor’s initial review and am still waiting for the reviewers’ decision. I cannot help checking the status everyday, although I had expected the wait would take at least three to four months. Overall, the experience was great. I think I’ve grown up so much as an academic and working with a writing partner made the whole process really fun and encouraging. It also helped me refine my research interests as well. I am planning on writing another detailed posting about this experience if I get the good news.

Second, about where in the world I have been for the past two months. I’m back in a language classroom. Not even as a teacher, but as a student. I am learning Spanish with my husband in a military language institute. I’ve been in many different types of language classrooms with a different identity: as an EFL student in Korea, ESL student in the US, English instructor to Korean EFL students, and Korean language instructor to KFL students. But the environment that I am in now is yet another setting that is nothing like the ones that I was in before. Everyone but me speaks English as their first language and there are only two other students who “seriously” learned a foreign language before. Naturally my approach to the Spanish language learning, as an ESL speaker learning her fourth language, is very different with that of the other students. I definitely have some advantages because I know and “do” grammar, and I know, better than anyone if I may be so bold, how learning another language can make you feel–you are always tired because you constantly exert yourself mentally, always have to stay on your toes not to seem stupid, yet at times you still miss things, so feel permanently misunderstood. So I can definitely say I have pretty good endurance for emotional part of learning. But I still have my share of difficulties because I am the only one with different linguistic backgrounds so how I process and understand a foreign language is different. This is, however, such a powerful and great experience that has allowed me to better understand the linguistic and cultural minority students that I would like to serve in the future with my research. At first, it was hard for me to be away from my doctoral studies and research, especially since I have a serious case of academic FOMO (Fear of missing out). But in the end, I’ve found ways to connect dots.

In terms of learning, the experience has been great. Spanish is a really fun language and I am really motivated each day. Hopefully, I can share more about my experience as part of my ongoing autoethnography. And it’d also suit the title of this blog