Learning a Language, Acquiring an Identity

Stephanie Zlotnick
B8100 Second Language Acquisition
Professor Barbara Gleason
May 17, 2022
 In August 2009, I went to San Francisco on a family vacation in honor of my Bat

Mitzvah. Instead of big parties in event venues with DJs and dancefloors like most Jewish kids in

our town, my parents proposed to my siblings and me that all B’nei Mitzvah parties would be at

our house, and the following summers, we would take a family vacation to a location of our

choice, within reason of course. For my sister Robin’s Bat Mitzvah trip, I was seven years old

when we spent a week on a dude ranch in the depths of the Rocky Mountains and rode horses

through the trails and learned how to square dance. A couple years later, after our brother Dan’s

Bar Mitzvah, we flew to Costa Rica where we went white water rafting and hiked through the

jungle with a guide who looked like Tarzan. When it was my turn to choose, all I wanted, all I

begged for, all I dreamt of was Paris. Paris was where my heart was even though I had never

seen it. The fashion I had read about in Elle Magazine and heard about on Project Runway. The

pastries I saw in my dad’s cookbooks. The language I was just beginning to grasp. The culture I

wished I had been born into. My parents ran the numbers, and it just wasn’t feasible, but they

promised I would make it there someday. So, we redirected to a more accessible city, and after a

few days in San Francisco, we drove through Big Sur and then explored Yosemite National Park.

Even at thirteen years old, I knew better than to complain; I was a lucky kid.

Walking towards Fisherman’s Wharf to see the famous sea lions, Robin and I were

practicing our French. We often practiced French at home, but she was six years ahead of me in

school, which meant her skills far exceeded mine that I had developed from middle school

French class: just 40 minutes a day for two years. Our conversations would begin with friendly

greetings, maybe move into questions about the day’s activities or suggestions for snacks if we

were particularly hungry. No matter the subject of our conversations, they always ended with

Robin saying something well beyond my knowledge and me saying “huh?” which signaled that it

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was time for English. That cloudy day in California, surrounded by other tourists with sea lions

barking in the background, Robin and I had one of our typical French conversations. We made

fun of ourselves and made up words and created our own special dialect of Franglish tarnished

by our New York accents. Just as we finished this nonsense conversation, we looked around and

saw a family of tourists watching us. They then looked at each other and began speaking in what

sounded like beautiful, musical, whimsical, native French. We buried our bright red faces in our

hands, horrified that an actual French family witnessed our bumbled use of their language.

~ ~ ~

Before I reached seventh grade, the year Somers Middle School required students to

choose a foreign language, I was interested in French. I wish that I could say it was for any

reason other than the fact that my big sister was taking French, but I can’t. Throughout

elementary school, like many younger siblings, I molded my life to look like hers in any way I

could. I clung to Robin while she did her homework and asked her to teach me. Un, deux, trois,

quatre, cinq, sept, huit, neuf, dix, onze. “I can count to eleven in French,” I would brag to my

friends. Bonjour! Au revoir! “Hello and goodbye are so easy to say.”

According to Vygotsky’s social view of learning, my interactions with Robin were

crucial. Because I went into my first French class with even a little knowledge of the most basic

vocabulary and which sounds were made by which letter combinations, I would argue that I

began this process with a large zone of proximal development; there existed plenty of space for

me to learn and absorb the rules that made all of those sounds happen. According to Vygotsky,

the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is “the discrepancy between a child’s actual mental age

and the level he reaches in solving problems with assistance” (187). Under the guidance of my

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teachers, classmates, and sister, my language learning process was a continual meeting of

concepts I knew and concepts I could know.

Meanwhile, I was doodling dresses, skirts, and blouses on loose leaf paper and writing

descriptions of color and material and sequins next to each one. I was at some point gifted a

subscription to Elle Magazine, a sketchbook, and a how-to book on drawing clothing. Instead of

trying out for the school softball team like my sister did, I followed my own interests and landed

in an after-school sewing class at a local fabric store. In my eyes, formally learning French and

developing my sewing and design skills became the keys to a future full of croissants and berets

and strolls along the Seine.

In seventh grade, I became friends with Elizabeth. Her dad had a job that took him and

his family around the world, so she had already lived in Iowa, Australia, and England before she

reached New York. Her worldliness gave her a leg up on language acquisition; even though she

had lived in all English-speaking places, she had already been surrounded by people from all

over. While I could brag to some of my other friends that my sister had taught me to count way

before they learned, I could not compete with the deeper understanding of French language and

culture that Elizabeth had. We had many classes together, so we quickly became inseparable—

always partnering for projects when we had the choice and doing homework together after

school. While my sister became busy with friends and AP classes and varsity softball, Elizabeth

became my French resource. Between these two people with greater skill helping me along my

language learning and a surprising natural ability, I was actually pretty good at it.

In French class, instruction focused on general grammar rules, conjugating regular and

some irregular verbs, and having basic conversations. Homework often included charts that

looked something like this:

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 Conjugate the verb according to each subject.
être avoir
Je Nous Je Nous
Tu Vous Tu Vous
Il/Elle Ils/Elles Il/Elle Ils/Elles
marcher parler
Je Nous Je Nous
Tu Vous Tu Vous
Il/Elle Ils/Elles Il/Elle Ils/Elles

I understood sentence structure and I wasn’t afraid of irregular verbs. I could see a word

and know exactly how to pronounce it, extra letters and all. I knew that grenouille sounded like

something like ghranweeyuh. I knew that, in general, if a word ended with a consonant, the last

letter was silent, but if you added an -e, you pronounced the last letter. Petit to petite, grand to

grande. I also knew that, unlike English, nouns and the articles that preceded them were

gendered. Le or la? Un or une? As Krashen and Terrell define these terms, I was learning French,

not acquiring it. This wasn’t a natural process; it was based on memorizing rules and processing

errors (Krashen and Terrell 26). I wasn’t just learning French; I was learning about French. Had

my first few classes been more focused on conversation or real-world experience or learning how

to use context clues to translate, I might have begun by acquiring the language in a more

subconscious process: a process in which I was “not generally ‘aware’ of the rules,” but

linguistically competent nonetheless (Krashen and Terrell 26).

One activity that was common early on in my language learning included each student

holding a mini whiteboard and marker while the teacher shouted out a French phrase or short

sentence. Each student had to transcribe what they thought the teacher said and hold it up for

review. I can picture it: the sterile classroom in one of the newish wings of the middle school,

Mrs. Levine at the front of the room, the smell of dry erase markers filling the air. At first, the

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phrases were simple, things we had already learned. But Mrs. Levine must have known a thing

or two about ZPD because she shouted a question filled with brand new vocabulary that she

would ultimately teach us later on, scaffolding her instruction and aiming at “the area that [was]

just beyond” what we could already do (Freeman et al. 54). And it was definitely beyond

something because it sounded like nonsense to me. On my whiteboard, I wrote something along

the lines of Tukonait lafiela bah? Elizabeth’s board, meanwhile, had the correct phrase: Tu

connais la fille la bàs? Mrs. Levine explained the phrase’s meaning: Do you know the girl over

there? Once I knew the English meaning, my understanding of the sounds of French made

everything click. How could I have thought it would be anything else?

I was a naturally anxious kid—always anticipating the worst, spending hours in bed

trying and failing to sleep, and going through each day convinced strangers were out to get me.

Part of my anxiety stemmed from unreasonably high expectations that I had set for myself.

Despite my highly educated but extremely down-to-Earth parents telling me to relax and care

less about my report card, I had a drive to do everything and do it well. (Exploring all of this is a

story for another time.) I bring this up because one aspect of second language acquisition

scholarship places importance on “how people feel, respond, and evaluate” as factors that shape

learning (Lin et al. 728). Based on Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis, studies have shown that

“Learning efficiency would be reduced when fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions appear,

whereas positive emotions enhance learning outcomes” (Lin et al. 728). Thus, as an anxious

seventh grade student in the throes of finding her place in the social structure of a middle school,

I embodied the theory that “a learner’s self-image may be strongly dependent on a mode of

expression…that cannot be transferred until a certain level of competency is achieved” (Maftoon

and Sabah 38).

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 Because of these theories, I realize now that my anxiety—even though it quieted my class

participation and dampened my practice conversations—had to compete with another affect:

motivation. As I came to the end of my middle school career, my desire to achieve straight A’s

gave me the push I needed to get stronger. Krashen argues that “passive attitudes and lack of

motivation…are regarded as a filter which impedes learners’ response to language input” (Lin et

al. 729), and my experience was the polar opposite, enabling me to learn—really learn—French.

According to the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) theory, the motivation for language

learning is made up primarily of the ideal self, the ought-to self, and the learning experience

(Thompson and Vasquez 159). Studies have shown that a learner’s image of who they “would

like to become in terms of language ability and use” is the strongest motivator, and an elaborate

image of the ideal self is crucial (Thompson and Vasquez 159). Thompson and Vasquez specify

that role models are instrumental in helping learners conceptualize their ideals and develop

strategies to achieve them (160). As I had a figurative image of myself as the ideal, straight-A

student in addition to the physical image of my sister—who actually was a straight-A student

with exceptional French skills—I was highly motivated to improve my speaking skills.

A couple weeks after my trip to San Francisco, I stepped into Somers High School as a

scrawny, nervous freshman. Elizabeth had moved to Wisconsin a few months earlier, so I felt

alone in French class. Because there was only one class section worth of students in my grade

who chose French, we became quite a close group over the years. So, yes, I had other friends to

learn with and learn from, but ma meilleure amie was gone.

It helped that my motivation pushed me to become one of the best students in my little

cohort—maybe right behind the girl whose family had emigrated from Haiti. My pronunciation

was spot on, grammar made sense to me, and reading and writing French was fun. Conversation,

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however, was where I still struggled. Improvising felt scary. I didn’t feel like I could think fast

enough to put together the vocabulary I needed, and if my conversation partner—human or

computer—spoke a little too fast, I was lost. And as was my nature, I had set extraordinarily high

expectations for myself. If I couldn’t do it perfectly, I didn’t want to do it at all.

Under the best circumstances, I could converse well. I could answer questions about

myself, order food, ask for directions, anything—as long as I had a long moment to compose my

thoughts, plan my exact wording, and double, triple, quadruple check for correctness. I was

frustrated in those moments; I knew I knew what to say. But as Freeman et al. explain Noam

Chomsky’s theory of competence versus performance, “In most situations, we don’t perform up

to our full ability” (63). Since I had learned French with a distinct metalinguistic awareness

rather than natural acquisition, I was unable to completely remove the error checker in my mind:

“The function of conscious learning seems even more limited when we consider” that monitoring

speech requires time, because in reality, “normal conversation tends to be quite rapid” (Krashen

and Terrell 19). My performance did not consistently match the competence I knew I had.

Ninth and tenth grade French classes remain a blur. I must have learned a lot, though,

because I passed the New York State Regents Exam at the end of tenth grade, and somewhere

along the way, my conversational skills improved. After the Regents, continuing a foreign

language in my school was optional. There was no question: I was going to continue. By that

time, French was my second favorite class. My first favorite class was Fashion Marketplace.

Then eleventh grade French happened. As if eleventh grade wasn’t notoriously difficult

enough with SATs and college tours, that year in French class focused on history. With the

exception of a few grammar-oriented lessons, it was essentially a history of France class in

French. Despite—or perhaps because of—the difficulty of this class, this might have been the

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year that sparked the integration of foreign language acquisition into my foreign language

learning. Instead of learning about French, we were learning in French. As we learned about the

French Revolution and Napoleon and Marie Antoinette, the language was suddenly secondary to

the content, and we simply had to know it in order to understand anything at all. To this day, my

brain can only process the names of Louis XIV and Louis XVI as Louis Quatorze and Louis

Seize.

In twelfth grade, I felt a real shift. I was in AP French, preparing for the exam under the

guidance of Ms. Timone. She was a young teacher who had graduated from Somers High School

herself. She was the advisor of French Club and co-advisor/best friend of the advisor of Fashion

Club. Plus, she had previously taught my sister, so upon meeting her in ninth grade, I already had

a leg up to becoming one of her favorite students. But in addition to being a really cool person,

she was a really great teacher. We did group projects and played games. We watched Cyrano de

Bergerac starring Gérard Depardieu and talked about French cinema. We read L’Étranger by

Albert Camus and wrote analytical essays.

Not long after beginning Ms. Timone’s AP class, my inner monologue started to code-

switch. I would be in pre-calculus thinking, Ugh, ce cours est très ennuyeux. Dieu merci le

déjeuner est après. Maybe I’ll get a bag of chips today. D’accord, faites attention. To a degree I

had not previously reached, I was acquiring French, not just learning it.

I was lucky that year. Ms. Timone and her Fashion Club co-advisor/best friend/my other

favorite teacher, Mrs. Brooks, made Somers High School history by organizing the first

international school trip in decades: to Paris. My heart sang. Finalement! My parents were right:

I would make it there someday. “Someday” became spring break of my senior year.

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 This trip was years in the making for me, and because of that, I was determined to do it

right. I wanted to speak French with French people; I didn’t want to be une Americaine who

elicited eye rolls from locals. I was confident in my skills at this point, and I was ready to

perform to the best of my competence. And I did.

During an afternoon exploring Le Marais, I found myself at a bustling restaurant with a

group of classmates, most of whom were a year behind me, and no teachers. Our waitress was a

young woman who anxiously and apologetically told us she didn’t speak any English. When it

came time to order, many of the girls at my table felt shy while also hoping to request alterations

to some dishes on the menu. So, I ordered for everyone. The waitress stood next to me as I

pointed at each person, one by one, asking for their dish and all their substitutions: sans oeufs,

avec fruit, plus de fromage, etc. After a delicious meal with perfectly executed orders, we got up

to leave, probably heading to a patisserie for dessert. On my way out, the waitress looked at me

with a smile, kindly touched my arm, and whispered merci beaucoup.

I knew I was still une Americaine, but thanks to the level of acquisition I had reached, I

succeeded in a complex conversation. And I was proud. My performance, I felt, matched my

competence. My motivation, my immense joy, my lifelong dreams of the beautiful city: whatever

affective filters in my brain that silenced me in practice conversation had been diminished.

~ ~ ~

As I write this, I am weeks away from graduating from City College of New York with a

master’s degree in Language and Literacy, and I realize it was almost ten years ago to the day

that I flew to Paris for the first time. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the peak of my French

ability. Shortly after that trip, I would take the AP exam and pass, briefly consider a minor in

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French at the Fashion Institute of Technology but decide against it, and immerse myself in a

different city, one more linguistically accessible to me: New York City.

My relationship with the French language began as a result of my social context and

continued to be shaped by people who knew more than I did, but it also shaped me. I do not

consider myself bilingual at this point in my life. However, as I forge my career in adult

education, writing, and literacy, I believe my experience will help me help others. I do not know

the pressures of learning English after moving to the US from another country; I have not feared

that my professional, academic, or social experiences will be thwarted by the language through

which I communicate. Nevertheless, I recognize the impact social context has on a person’s

communication; I empathize with the anxiety that can hinder one’s language acquisition; and I

appreciate the feelings of pride, accomplishment, and power and the deep sense of identity that

language acquisition can ignite. When I tutor or teach students of all ages at all stages of English

acquisition with all levels of confidence, I can draw on these emotional facets of language

acquisition to create an environment that empowers students to communicate and express

themselves confidently.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve used writing as a way of processing my life. When I

got caught in lunch table drama with friends, I wrote fictionalized versions of the arguments in

short stories that I forced my family to read and tell me how creative I was. When my anxiety

kept me up on school nights, I described what I was feeling in my journal, willing my hand to

write as fast as my brain was moving. Now, I put my experiences into personal essays of various

forms, thinking and rethinking my actions, my words, my feelings, and finding deeper meaning

in my life. For this reason, it feels natural and exciting to analyze my foreign language learning

in an autobiographic form and contextualize my interpretations with scholarly research. In doing

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so, I have learned that my experiences have been simultaneously unique and universal, and so

have everyone else’s. We might all navigate various zones of proximal development, affective

filters, and discrepancies between our competence and performance, but our reactions to and

reflections of each vary from person to person. And it is this contradiction of individuality and

commonality that makes our world so confusing, intriguing, and worth writing about.

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 Works Cited

Freeman, David E., Yvonne S. Freeman, and Mary Soto. Between Worlds: Second Language
Acquisition in Changing Times, 4th ed. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, 2021.

Krashen, Stephen D. and Tracy D. Terrell. The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the
Classroom. The Alemany Press/Pergamon Press Ltd., Oxford, UK, 1983.

Lin, Hao-Chiang Koong, et al. “From a Perspective on Foreign Language Learning

Anxiety to Develop an Affective Tutoring System.” Educational Technology Research
and Development, vol. 63, no. 5, Springer Science + Business Media, 2015, pp. 727–47,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9385-6.

Maftoon, Parviz, and Somayyeh Sabah. “A Critical Look at the Status of Affect in Second
Language Acquisition Research: Lessons from Vygotsky’s Legacy.” Brain. Broad
Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, vol. 3, no. 2, EduSoft publishing,
2012, pp. 36–42.

Thompson, Amy S. and Camilla Vasquez. “Exploring Motivational Profiles Through Language
Learning Narratives.” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 99, no. 1, 2015, pp. 158–74,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43651883.

Vygotsky, L. S. (Lev Semenovich), and Alex Kozulin. Thought and Language. Translation
newly rev. and edited by Alex Kozulin, MIT Press, 1986.

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