{"id":5680,"date":"2018-12-14T11:44:04","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T16:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/?p=5680"},"modified":"2018-12-14T11:44:45","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T16:44:45","slug":"the-correlation-between-foreign-languages-and-community-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/2018\/12\/14\/the-correlation-between-foreign-languages-and-community-service\/","title":{"rendered":"The Correlation Between Foreign Languages and Community Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I continue to sift through research and interviews from the TES school in Taiwan, I\u2019ve found myself connecting with certain students and being able to understand more about what it means to be a global citizen. This has been very fitting, for my group has been looking at the impact that studying foreign language has on becoming a global citizen.<\/p>\n

In an interview, one student from the TES school explained the importance behind studying languages. This is a high school student whose family had traveled around quite a bit throughout his childhood. Therefore, learning different languages was an essential part of his education and social development. He often found that these languages allowed him to interact with different groups of people. I believe this impacted his personal philosophies on culture and identity. In other words, I would argue that studying these languages allowed him to be more open and accepting towards a greater and more diverse group of people. There are some limitations when looking at studying language, such as the influence of westernization; although this blog post is strictly looking at the more optimistic side.<\/p>\n

While reading, I also began to form a bit of a hypothesis about the effect of foreign languages. I found that there seems to be a correlation between studying languages and community service. I understand this may seem as a stretch to many; however, if you look at the benefits of learning a language, they often have to do with being able to communicate to a larger audience and sharing culture. Doing community service in a global setting shares a strong connection with this idea of communicating and exchanging customs.<\/p>\n

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https:\/\/www.languagemagazine.com\/teaching-english-internationally\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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https:\/\/www.lawpracticetoday.org\/article\/benefits-community-service-lawyer\/#prettyPhoto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another point I\u2019d like to discuss is the TES student\u2019s participation in the National Honor Society, which is an organization for high school students who excel academically and provide leadership and service for their community. I don\u2019t mean to oversell NHS: this is simply their mission. I was able to connect with this TES student, because I too participated in NHS as a high school student at a well-established public school in Massachusetts.\u00a0 In all honesty, I was not typically fond of the way the NHS at my school was run; however, I appreciated the volunteer opportunities that came from NHS. Many of the volunteer efforts by the TES student stemmed from this National Honor Society mentality as well, although the student performed tasks on a more global level then I did. My school even had a Foreign Language National Honor Society, which I believe accurately presented my hypothesis that studying languages can correlate to community service.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d lastly like to address some of the ways that this whole concept of teaching languages might be seen as problematic. Global citizenship can easily become confused with westernization and conquest. I understand that teaching English around the world may seem troubling. In some cases, where political powers are instilling their beliefs upon minorities, there are issues. However, in the case of this TES student, he is simply making a choice to sacrifice his time and share his knowledge for the benefit of others. When discussing learning English himself, the student mentioned: \u201cAnd in English class, recently we are learning poems and we have to discuss and share the emotions that we feel\u2026 I feel very comfortable sharing my experiences and opinions.\u201d By acting selfless and comfortable with language and culture, this student is simply showing what it takes to act as a global .<\/p>\n\n

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As I continue to sift through research and interviews from the TES school in Taiwan, I\u2019ve found myself connecting with certain students and being able to understand more about what it means to be a global citizen. This has been very fitting, for my group has been looking at the impact that studying foreign language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8097,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8097"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5680"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5685,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680\/revisions\/5685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}