For this week’s group discussion, I was paired with Buke and Jason I will be writing the blog post for our group. Our group was fortunate enough to have Buke and Jason, two non-native English speakers. Jason said that a strategy that would help him empower and assert his identity as a co-cultural speaker would be to have a mentor from his native country (China) that could relate to him and has been through the experiences and processes that he is about to go through. This mentor would serve as a good source of guidance for Jason and teach him how to succeed in classroom, professional, and social settings. Buke said that taking classes before she left Turkey helped her to learn how to speak and use English more formally because in Turkey, speaking and writing styles are more relaxed and not as formal. Also, in English there can be long and short sentences. But in Turkish, the language structure is different and there are usually only longer sentences. There are also no pronouns in Turkish, so Buke indicated that a strategy to help her better learn and understand pronouns would be visualization. Also collaborating with coworkers and fellow students who are native English speakers to read their material and get feedback about how to improver their own vocabulary and grammar.
