Summer Holiday Blogpost # 2

Summer holiday and languages

At the beginning of the summer, I feared that this would happen again. Every single summer that I have ever encountered causes me to lose the ease of speaking in my second language, English, as I would if I were to be in school. This doesn't mean I lose fluency or sense of grammar, but instead, I lose the ability to quickly debate and encounter long-winded conversations that required a lot of academic terminologies.  Where finding the specific words that enhance my dialogue that I usually practice in school, becomes harder.
"For lack of a better term" Becomes my go-to-sentence when explaining, describing or analysing during those conversations. 
Now at first, I thought this meant that I was at a loss during my summer break, but the distance I get from the use of the English language as an academic medium allows a particular spark to rise and causes me to become more interested in reading. I was always a bookworm growing up, always jumping from one story to the other, however since starting my tenth year in school and analyses began to get increasingly complex, I tend to gain a distaste for reading for pleasure. This is because once I'm in what I like to call the analytical IB Language and Literature zone, it becomes difficult for me to read without questioning everything and ACTS analysing everything. Whether it be the author's intentions with character and plot development, or trying to gain context of the story and so on and so forth. Not to mention my increasingly high standards in reading where I can't read stories that I take as underdeveloped or be lacking (whether it lacks substance, character arcs, plot development, etc.). 
Yet in the summer, I get to step out of my IB Language and Literature zone after a few weeks of relaxing I can finally begin to read for the sake of reading. I was able to explore scripts, novels, and the short stories. This is something that always takes me back to what I like to describe as the equivalent of comfort food. Reading for pleasure is like comfort food; all sorts of positive vibrations.
August 1st, marks the day I stepped back into my IB Language and Literature zone and began to finally read the inevitable Alice Munro (long) short stories.