Image by Dru Bloomfield - At Home in Scottsdale via Flickr

The success of language learning is not developed overnight. With its gradual, step-by-step methods, a learner will undergo different levels of obstacles and challenges. Sometimes, learners will attempt to suspend their learning because it appears like they are not moving forward or improving their language skills. And even by trying out different methods, sometimes, they are still not motivated to learn and just decide to call it  “quits”.

If you really want to improve and learn a new language, you need to work hard. After a while you will see that the effort has worth your while. This post is dedicated to one person who has made a difference and is an example to language learners out there, Joanne Lee. Out of her eagerness to learn, this champion overcome all of her language barrers and has achieved her goal with excellent results.

The Herald-Mail issued an article about a current event where a youngster by the name of Joanne Lee, who presently,  is the frontrunner of the Washington Country Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. The thirteen-year old student, is famous for earning prestigious trophies by winning the Spelling Bee in her sixth, seventh, and eighth year. On June 2nd of this year, Joanne, together with the other 274 contestants across United States, will represent the Washington County Public Schools on the mentioned Spelling Bee.

This may sound ordinary compared to other brilliant students, but Joanne is no ordinary apprentice since English is not her native language.  Joanne’s mother, Hsiu-Hsueh Schubel, was an immigrant from Taiwan to the United States in the 1990s. Naturally, Hsiu-Hsueh was not a good English speaker when Joanne was still a toddler, so she wasn’t able to teach English to her daughter. Instead, she allowed Joanne to speak Mandarin Chinese around their house and her daughter started developing bad habits when trying to speak English.

Because Joanne resides in an English-speaking country, Hsiu-Hsueh had to expose her to a foreign language class in her younger age. And when Joanne started to go to school, she had to double her learning skills by taking up special English classes.

Sounds easy right? But it’s not. Even if children are generally absorbable to what their environment teaches them, you have to consider the attention span these children can contain, particular on traditional classroom set ups. In Joanne’s case, she enables herself to learn both basic classroom lessons and extra English language classes—all at the same time. Usually, she may result only as an average pupil in school, but her results are even remarkable. She excels so much with her language lessons to the extent of lifting her up to the present level she is in right now. Isn’t it amazing?

This is actually great news to those who look at language learning a tedious fad to study. But if only learners could entail this as a stepping stone to great success, then they will pursue such learning. See how rewarding Joanne’s effort has been, when her mom says: “[Joanne] had to go through this language barrier all by herself, it made me very proud of her.” Her efforts were never counted in vain. Instead, it made her into a champion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Language and Science, Language News, Learning in holidays, Young Learners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.