Purpose of creating this blog

* This post is to provide “Polyglots and Hyperpolyglots” blog followers the background of creating this blog. It would enable the followers to understand the blogger’s intention of creating this blog and prospect how this blog would look like in the future.

My philosophy of teaching and learning is that it is an ongoing process throughout a lifetime. Even though I am now a language teacher myself, I continuously learn new languages. Since I arrived in Montreal, I have been learning French for over a year now. Personally, I believe that learning new languages helps me become a better language learner because I get to understand the learners’ point of view of – the difficulty of learning a new language.

My teaching career started since I was a senior in high school. I started teaching languages; English and Korean to students in various ages and levels of proficiency. I worked part-time as a language teacher in private institutes and post-graduate institutes. I have mostly taught English to high school students and adults in Korea. For high school students, I helped them prepare for English proficiency exams and university interviews. In addition, I taught business communication and writing to adults who needs to learn English for work-related purposes. I always enjoyed delivering knowledge and seeing students develop language skills. In Montreal, I taught two sections of EAST 220 First Level Korean course in McGill University every week (2016Fall & 2017Winter). Teaching Korean was new to me however, I had a wonderful opportunity to teach students at McGill. I used videos, audio files and multimedia in class to create an active learning environment. In addition, I always tried to deliver the language along with the Korean culture. One of the motivations of creating a language blog was to enhance students’ understanding of Korean culture and to share my struggles when I was learning languages. All content in the blog is through my own real-life experiences of language learning and teaching.

I was privileged to have a chance to learn many languages. It was either because I was living in the country where the language was spoken or the language course was part of the second language curriculum in school. I have experience learning five languages: English, Korean, French, Japanese and Mandarin. Language learning is never easy and there are many stories which I wanted to share with my students and friends who are interested in learning new languages. This blog is mainly about my personal language learning and teaching experiences which could strongly relate to language learners’ own experiences. In addition, the blog talks about the historical and cultural backgrounds of the language. Language is inseparable with culture however this is difficult to learn when you are learning a language as a foreign language. I have opened this blog entitled, “Polyglots and Hyperpolyglots,” in 2016 and received several feedbacks so far from my colleagues in education. I seek to continue blogging and hope to share my teaching and learning experiences throughout my career.