Healani!

Hi, I’m Healani! I’m one of the authors for Learning Language through Film. This website is the place where we get to show you how we see the world and how it has changed. Before we begin, we’re going to need a working definition for literacy because it is what started this whole project. Literacy is the knowledge that you hold and wield over some specific piece of life that could be anything from being literate in how to put cars together, cooking, or languages.   

My journey starts with language. Learning how to communicate with other people is how we all started in life. Most of us started with trying to get food or tell people when we woke up and needed changing. These things are the way we all began communicating our needs with others. Moving from generic sounds to forming words and sentences is where a lot of people believe their journey into literacy stops. However, the journey goes beyond those beginning steps and creates the world that we live inside today. This brings us to my present time and my future.  

This past quarter I have been enrolled in English 101, where I have learned how to create my own form of communication and let others understand me through them. Some of these forms are through the Webtext website, emails and food. One of my favorite ways to communicate with others is through the food I create. Before English 101, I had never understood that I could show others how I feel through food. I loved figuring out what flavors could show what feelings and how that could change and move others. Food is a necessity of life, no one can get away with not eating and survive. Food is also connected to culture and the lifestyles that we all live. When we think of food, we can think of it in terms of Mexican, Italian, Chinese, and so on and so forth. We can also think of food it the way that people make it and bring it to us. There’s fast food and restaurants or prepackaged compared to a home-cooked meal. All of these are different ways to express ourselves. Literacy forms itself around the knowledge that you hold and I am literate in baking and creating foods that others can enjoy. This is how I show my emotions to the world. If I had never been in English 101, I never would have found this knowledge and I never could have been able to share it with all of you.  

Inside one question contains the beginning of a lifetime’s worth of other questions. In this instance, the first question was “What do you want to research? What interests you enough to go find out more about it?” My answer was language and film, but it didn’t stop there. We had to create a study around this question, get results, and learn from what we were doing. The results from our survey gave me so many more questions that we just didn’t have time to ask about and gather data for. I would love to investigate having language classes that only had class a day to two each month and watched films. These could help tune the ear to how others speak the language or how the grammar is used on a day to day basis. All of these things could grow faster and prove to be more helpful in a classroom setting. These are just the beginnings of the questions that I now hold for how language can be learned- but the best part of that, we can learn together, after all that’s what this website is made for.