ENTRY #5

Discuss linguistic interference

In the organization, we can't see cultural objects displayed. There is no flag, no religious symbol... There is only a very big graffiti painted on the wall but it represents the members' kids so it is nothing related to culture. There is a place where there are a lot of flyers and they are written in English AND French, which shows how bilingual Montréal is.
People here celebrate almost every holidays, except those who can't because of their religion (some don't celebrate Halloween, for example). The adults celebrate most of the holidays in family whereas younger prefer celebrating it with friends, except for Thanksgiving, because I was told that it is a holiday that has for goal to gather family.
What has surprised me about holidays here is that people are truly involved: for Halloween, I saw so many houses decorated, probably more than I have ever seen during 17 years in France. This is outstanding because there, I used to be the only one who was excited about this holiday.

Rewards and challenges

My main challenge was about my shyness.  This internship helped me overcoming it so now I am not so afraid talking in English and/or making mistakes. I am so much more comfortable at speaking English, even to strangers. The total immersion helped me to improve my English because it forces me to practice my english, I have no other way to communicate but in English. 

ENTRY #4

Discuss linguistic interference

I have a lot of interferences as my first language is French and also because speaking English every day is something I am really not used to.

The challenges I have to face are about it and they are caused by linguistic interference. Most of the mistakes I make are about vocabulary: when there is a word I cannot find in English, I use the French version but with an English accent, which is a very amateur mistake.

Other mistakes I usually make are about pronunciation but that is only when I have to read, thing I don’t often do in my internship.

Learning English in the internship V.S. in a classroom

In the internship, the learning is more “active”, it is a learning through practicing. We do not have the traditional structured classroom setting but I think it is still a good way to learn because we use variety of words, vocabulary.

In class, in contrary, the vocabulary we learn is more limited: the vocabulary we learn is according to the theme of the chapter and so on whereas in the stage, we can talk about anything anytime. 

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• seeds: Éco-Quartier supports the fact that everything is usable in various ways. During Halloweenm a lot of people buy pumpkins and dig tem to use it as decoration but then they throw the rest away. Nikki showed me that all the inside can be eaten, including the seeds (and it tasted so good)