Reflection & Questions Answered

I am happy to say that the senior project experience has been truly eye-opening. Not only have I been given the opportunity to delve into topics that I am deeply interested in, but I have been able to learn more about myself.

Firstly, I discovered a new motivation for something that I'd never experienced before-- academic research?! When the third trimester first began, everything moved very, very slowly and I thought "Is this even worth doing? I feel like I'm not really going to come up with anything useful." Slowly but surely, everything fell into place as time went on and I found myself going home and eagerly reading my books and researching online. However, there were still some times when I wanted to just drop everything, take a nap, and never have to wake up to responsibilities ever again. Luckily, I always assumed responsibility for my project and went on.

This experience truly made me realize why I came to BASIS to begin with. As an incoming sophomore, transferring schools is a risk most people don't take solely because of the difficult transition from school district to school district. However, the intense and unique BASIS curriculum as well as the senior research project really intrigued me and, as someone who is always looking to challenge herself, I found BASIS the place I've always wanted to be. Although throughout my time at BASIS, I went from being interested in veterinary studies and biology to politics and international relations, my passion for linguistics and language acquisition remained and I never thought I'd have the opportunity to delve deeper into the subjects aside from taking French classes.

If I had a redo for my project, I would have definitely focused on one language, and probably Chinese (because I am fluent in it). Had I known that I would eventually only have 15 minutes to present on all of topics I've been studying for three months. Unfortunately, I was not aware at the beginning that we'd be so limited in our presentation time, so much of what I researched was cut out in the end due to time restraints. I was pretty disappointed about that, but I received a great amount positive feedback after my presentation, which made me feel a lot better after a comment about a possible error in my presentation. Many people approached me after my presentation even begging for me to present my original, full presentation to them and that they would be very interested in seeing the rest of my work, which made me very happy!

After attending all of the presentations (which all blew me away), I found that you could learn a lot about a person from not only their research topics, but from their poise and tone of presenting as well. It made me realize that there are so many different approaches to good public speaking and that everyone is very different. Personally, I don't like to rehearse my presentations beforehand to avoid sounding robotic and to be able to express my natural light-hearted and humorous personality. If I ever trip up during a presentation, I'll usually make a joke out of it and laugh with the audience. I think this type of presenting is very effective for people like me because it creates a more relaxed setting. Professionalism does not mean forgetting about personality and humor! After my presentation, someone approached me about how different they felt while I was presenting-- as if I was talking to my friend about new findings in an everyday conversation-- and how it really changed the mood of the event atmosphere for him. A parent also told me that my findings needed to be published for new immigrants to see! But if you think about it, the people who just arrive in the country probably 1. Don't read newspapers or news online from American platforms and 2. Definitely don't read it in English if they're just learning. Although farfetched, I am interested in getting my research translated into various languages so that it can be used to help immigrants begin their ESL journeys.

Overall, I am very proud of my project and its outcomes. It has not only proved to other people how passionate I am about linguistics, but I've also shown myself just how much I am interested in the topic. In the future, I will definitely study linguistics, as I believe that language is significant because means being able to communicate with a whole new group of people and being one step closer to being able to understand a new part of the world. I also will continue my research into ESL studies and hopefully will be able to help bridge the gap in language interference.

I would love to take this opportunity to thank Ms. Abdelaziz and Ms. Belcher for being such huge help to my presentation process. As Ms. A mentioned in her introduction for me, her job was pretty easy because I essentially was able to do everything on my own. However, it was always nice to know that I had someone to rely on if I ever needed help or advice and her mere presence was relieving and appreciated. Also, to Ms. Belcher who dealt with all of my late blog posts (please forgive me-- including this one) and helped me through the process of reviewing for my presentation. I couldn't have done this without either of you and I'm so glad to have met and worked with such amazing educators in my time in high school.

Q&A SESSION QUESTIONS ANSWERED:

After my presentation, during the Q&A session, there were two questions (or one question and one comment, I should say) that I was not able to give a direct answer to. So, here are the answers.

Q: Doesn't yi ge in Chinese basically represent articles?

A: For some reason, I had a brainfart after the question was asked, but after getting into the car to go home, I realized I actually knew the answer all along and just had to think more about it. Yi ge in Chinese translates literally into "one unit," and while it can be used LIKE an article in English, yi means one and ge is a classifier, one of which is also pair in a pair of pants or herd in a herd of cattle. So, neither of the words used in yi ge are equivalent to articles in English.

Q (comment): Indo-Aryan languages have many consonant clusters, but in the pronunciation chart, it says that they are rare, which is definitely not true.

A: You are correct. This was actually a mistake on my part while creating my second, more condensed version of the presentation. I misread a full sentence in my original presentation saying that specific clusters are rare in Indo-Aryan languages, but I guess I only took into account the "rare" part and put that into my chart.

I really wish I could go back to the Q&A and resolve these issues (because it made me look very incredible), but no one is perfect and I make mistakes just as anyone else does, so it's not the end of the world. For the record, immediately after I realized the answer to the first question, I contacted the person (one of my classmates) and explained it to her to clear it up.