A chairde!

Conas atá sibh?

Today we arrive at the last blog post *queue uncontrollable sobbing*. We have come so far and it’s been so good, but unfortunately as with all good things, this too must come to an end.

For my final hurrah I would like to do a little look back over the past 12ish weeks. Not to blow my own trumpet or anything but I feel like I’ve improved at this blogging craic in leaps and bounds over the past few months and a lil throwback to acknowledge that wouldn’t do any harm.

It all started with a fairly cringe introductory blog  in which I tried my very hardest to be funny:

“For those of you who accidentally stumbled upon this blog, I’m Sorry, eh I mean, I’m Saoirse!”

why didn’t someone shoot me, like genuinely?

Then came my first official post where I rated different language learning blogs and websites. Thankfully by now I had learned my lesson and toned down the “humor”. Researching these turned out to be really useful for my German and Irish learning throughout the semester ( & I’m not just saying that for the blog) Coffee Break German was a really useful resource when studying for my oral, last week.

In the second CALL related post (that’s Computer Assisted Language learning for any of y’all who’ve been living under a rock for the past 12 weeks) I reviewed mo ghrá go deo that is Teanglann. Teanglann has single handedly gotten me through my Irish module this semester and tbh I think they deserve a round of applause.          shout out to Teanglann!

Keeping with the CALL theme, in week three I explored the idea of having a language learning style and whether or not it was a load of crap, spoiler: it wasn’t.

In blog post numero 5, I delved into the deep, dark and nasty realm that is social media and discussed digital literacy (specifically my digital literacy) in this context. Then we explored ICC (Intercultural Communicative Competence for those who weren’t paying attention the first time) and the 5 savoirs, with particular focus on how Byram’s method is used with regards teaching. As I mentioned in the blog, this approach has really helped me with preparing how to teach during my work experience next year. The subsequent post in week 7 kept with the ICC theme. I really enjoyed this one as I got to explore the topic while also focusing in on how it related to refugee integration, a subject that I feel is of the utmost importance.  Similarly in the next post I applied the SMART method to the Soliya programme I got to take part in this year.

My final three posts varied from corpus linguistics all the way to DGBLL (or Digital Game Based Language Learning) with a bit of social media addiction thrown in the mix as well. All in all, I’ve found this process of Blog writing has really enhanced my understanding of the course material in a way I definitely didn’t experience last semester. Having to condense, summarize and explain the subject to someone else has been a really fruitful way of learning.

Finally I’d like to say a HUGE thank you to all my readers/ fanclub for reading and commenting week in and week out. It would have been fairly dull without a bit of social interaction so, thank you for your service!

Slán agus beannacht,

Saoirse x