Within my community it is evident that not everyone studying abroad can have a boundless experience. For me, studying abroad was a life without limits; I was traveling every weekend, eating great foods, and living a worry free life. Now that I’ve been around other students who are studying abroad in America, I can say that my experience is not identical to theirs. For example, a few of the friends I’ve met through the CIES program often talk about their right budget and inability to travel to sites not even 20 minutes away from where they’re living. The differentiating factor here is the normalization in the United States of conveniences such as owning a car, the broad middle class, and University funding. After realizing these international students weren’t going to get the full “American University” experience on their own and weren’t going to see a lot of what Florida has to offer, I became good friends with them and started taking them places. I hope these friendships last a lifetime.
Congruent with this theme, I plan on covering the subject of comfort in language learning and how socialization plays a role in adopting a new language. I have already seen firsthand how individuals open up to the idea of challenging themselves in a new language when they are comfortable in the language use situation. Socializing with the international students had allowed me to teach them more about English, incorporating both proper and informal aspects of the language. I want individuals to see how comfortability in social situations breeds fluency in new languages.
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