Hi all- I hope everyone settled back smoothly to State College and wherever home is for you right now!
Last week, we presented our preliminary results! It felt really exhilarating to present the research that I collected for the first time. Of course, there are many things I can improve in about my presentation, but I’m glad that I did it for the experience and to reflect on what I can do better in the upcoming times. The professors’ comments and questions were helpful. One is Dr. Arias noting that vowels’ confusability is something that might be generally present in language, which from a preliminary look at our results vowel confusability seems to be indeed present in EngL1 and not only EngL2, but seems to be more pronounced and presented a bit differently in EngL2 compared to EngL1 speakers. Also, we received about 80 interested participants this week. I was taken aback (of course, in a good way) by this huge number, although it felt a bit unfortunate that it was our last week there, and we realistically can’t run all or most of them. Kaleb and I scheduled a total of 13, given the time limit of it being our last week.
As for end-of-trip city exploration, we visited Chapultepec Castle. Its medieval architecture is exquisite. It was built in the 18th century and served mainly as a residence for Spanish leaders and then Mexican emperors and presidents. It is located within Bosque de Chapultepec, which is the largest park in Latin America, and it reminded me very much of Central Park.
Fast forward to the day of our flight, when we landed at Dulles International Airport, interestingly I found myself using basic conversational Spanish out of mere habit, and it was hard for me not to say “Sí,” “Hola,” “Gracias,” etc. I had to be intentional to switch back to English. I think I said “Sí” to the TSA security in Dulles. In any case, I will miss the challenges and excitement of trying to use a language I’m not yet fluent in.
I can think of a couple of takeaways from this trip. First, while this may be obvious, it emphasized the power of having a mutual language, which I think we take for granted. For example, for those who I didn’t share a mutual language with where we’re both are fluent in, even if Google Translate came to the rescue or someone helped translate, I felt there was still somewhat a barrier to achieve that deeper, richer interaction that I yearned for. I was initially comfortable being fluent in Arabic, my L1, and English, my L2, but this experience motivated me as well as showed me the great value that comes with learning new languages. Also, I think one doesn’t have to learn a new language perfectly as long as one can convey their thoughts fairly well in that language. Another takeaway is that being in a new environment is a great way to trigger good habits. In Mexico, I went to the gym nearly every day and read extensively, which are things I didn’t do quite consistently when I was in State College.
Last but not least, I want to sincerely thank PIRE and everyone involved who made this possible. I feel immensely grateful to everyone—from my incredibly supportive advisor, Dr. Carlson, to the project managers, to Penn State faculty, to the international PIRE sites who were all unquestionably instrumental in this process. Finally, I can’t wait to thoroughly analyze the data and learn about other PIRE fellows’ research this coming year. I already miss Mexico City, but I hope to revisit one day and reminisce on the good days I spent there and the cool people I met.
Take care, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your summer!
Rand