Blog 4

Reflection

This class has been very beneficial in allowing me a chance to learn so much about second language acquisition, which as a future teacher is essential. I will encounter ESL students in my classroom so I need to be well equipped to be able to help accommodate them and meet their needs. This class has help taught me about how important it is for ESL students to feel safe and comfortable in the classroom. If they are satisfied with their teacher and instruction they will be a lot more motivated to learn English and interact with others (Ortega, p.190). They can be motivated either intrinsically by their need and want to learn English or extrinsically to do well in their classes or to get a good job (Ortega, p. 176). It’s important to help keep that motivation alive whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic.

ESL students will learn more from their everyday conversations as oppose to the information that they could read about or from just hearing English being spoken to them. It is important for them interact with native speakers and learn English through conversation; their mistakes will help them grow as their inter-language develops into proper English. Negative feedback can also be effective in helping L2 learners improve their understanding of a second language such as their grammar or form. It is okay to correct your students English by asking them clarify what they said or having them try to correct their mistakes (Ortega, p. 71). As a teacher we should not let our concern of embarrassing them stop us from correcting their mistakes because that is how they will learn. This class has taught how there are so many factors that influence learning a second language such as memory capacity, attention, intention, noticing, as well as their first language (Ortega, p. 91-97). Their first language can negative or positively affect their ability to learn a second language depending on differences or similarities that can be found among their first language and English. As a teacher I need to be aware of this and understand that a student may struggle with the grammar rules or form in English because it is so different from their native language. I learned that having a positive attitude is not enough for a student to learn an L2. All the key ingredients need to be there. In the book Wes was unable to master English as a second language because he did not pay attention to his mistakes in English or try to correct himself when his English confused others around him. He did not put in the effort needed to successfully speak English (Ortega, p.58). I will keep these important facts in mind when working with ESL students to help them be as successful as possible.

As for the blogs we did in this class, they were very helpful in allowing me to connect what I read each week to actual experiences by my classmates, second language speakers, and ESL or Bilingual teachers. I got to earn about my classmate’s experience and journey with learning a second language in their first blog. It was interesting to see how all of our experiences of learning an additional language were similar. I learned about how important being dedicated to learning a second language can be no matter how old you are. In Blog 2 I was able to get a glimpse into the lives of other second language learners and their real life struggles. This will help me identify with my future ESL students and be more mindful of what they are going through. From blog 3 I was able to learn from different teacher’s perspectives what working with ESL and bilingual students is like. I was not aware of how important visuals and hand gestures can be in the learning process. I was able to understand even more how important motivation is in the learning of an L2. I realize now how the teacher's role is in providing the best instruction by using different strategies like sentence stems and group work.

Lastly, one change in this class that I think would contribute to the learning process would be to have this class in person. Each week there was a lot of material to cover including readings and videos so I think meeting in person and being able to discuss the readings and videos weekly would have been more helpful for me personally.

Blog Entry 3

I interviewed Mrs. Garcia, who has had been a bilingual teacher for 10 years. For her first five years so taught in a bilingual classrooms with both kindergarten and first grade, where they learned English for 45 minutes a day. These students were only exposed to Spanish at home and knew a little English.
The next five years she taught in a dual classroom where she spoke mostly in English for all math, English, and social studies instructions, and spoke very little Spanish. I asked her several questions that touched upon the following topics: the biggest challenging learning English as a second language, motivation, strategies she uses in the class, negative feedback, factors that help student learn a second language successfully, and how she planned her lessons.

When I asked her about the biggest challenge learning English for her Spanish speaking students, she discussed how the phonics in English is much more difficult than Spanish because some English words do not sound they way they are written like the sights words. At that bilingual school she taught at the students would first learn how to read in Spanish and then move on to English, so there would some confusion because the student would struggle in reading in English because it was so different. She discussed how she would start with stories to get her students interested and motivated, then uses sight words from the story to help her students learn important vocabulary words.

I asked Mrs. Garcia how her students remained motivated within her classroom and she talked about how their parents supported their learning of English, and that their Hispanic culture had taught them to be respectful of others especially the teacher and to try and learn as much as they could from them. She made her class hands on by using flashcards, manipulative, and matching with pictures and popsicle sticks, which her students loved. This is reaffirmed by Ortega, which states " that positive attitudes towards the learning context as well as the L2 community and culture and current satisfaction with teacher and instruction can boost motivation considerably (p. 190)".

When I asked her about whether she used negative feedback and if it was effective, she talked about how she explicitly corrected her students mistakes in grammar right away while they were in the process of learning because its important to do so for younger children like kindergarten and first grade. She finds that this kind of feedback is helpful for her students to learn and grow. According to Ortega, when comparing the results from different studies that used different types of negative feedback, the more explicit ones were shown to be more efficient ( p. 75).

Mrs. Garcia relayed that one of most important factors that help student successfully learn an additional language is a lot of practice at school and at home. Unfortunately, the students who attended the school had parents who did not know English so she told her students to try and teach their parents what they learned at school to help them practice at home. According to Ortega, when L2 learners interacted with others in different case studies they showed greater acquisition level of their second language compared to L2 learners who did interact or barely interacted by .75 standard deviation, which is a significant difference (p.66)

She currently teaches ESL at Velasquez Elementary, which is a monolingual school. They recently got a 4th grade student from China who speaks Mandarin and does not know any English. I ended the interview by asking her about what assistance is being given to Shiqun. She discussed how she uses a lot of visuals, repetition, and hand gestures to communicate with him, and although he is in the silent period, he has been making some progress, and that because he is still young she believes that he will be able to learn English easier than he would later in life so she has high hopes for him. According to Ortega, the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis states that adults and children go through language acquisition in different ways because children have an innate ability to perceive grammar while adults have lost this ability, therefore have to use problem solving (p. 22).

Second Language Interview

Interview Reflection

 I was given the opportunity to discuss with Hasham Kahn his experience with learning English as a second language. Hasham's experience with English at school in Dubai was not very effective with all of teachers having an Arab background and not being well educated in English, therefore they were not able to answer a lot of questions that he had about English. Hasham has always been an eager learner and wanted to go beyond the class's scope and became as proficient in English as could be, but due to his teachers being bound to a strict curriculum and not having enough extra time to help him grow further in the language, he was not very fluent in English before moving to Canada at the age of 15.  He was hindered by own inadequate education and lack of proper resources. Most of English he learned before coming to Canada at the age of 15 was from speaking it at home with his parents, whose fluency extended to only basic English, and the American films he liked to watch.
         After living in Canada for the past 9 years and being exposed to English full time in his high school curriculum, as well as all the people he interacted with on a daily basis, including friends, teachers, and his host family he lived with, he was able to become fluent in English. He did struggle quite a bit within the first year or two with his confidence due to not be able to communicate his thoughts effectively from a lack of extensive vocabulary and confidence. He mentioned later after our interview about being in ESL for the first two year because although he understand and spoke English at a basic level, being in high school required a deeper, more complex comprehension of English for learning the more sophisticated topics and concepts in the various subjects. One of his biggest struggles was with semantics, which pertains to comprehending the meaning of a phrase or sentence by understanding each individual word. However, he has overcame this and is now very confident in his ability to articulate his thoughts clearly and easily. Now he actually considers himself more fluent in English than his native Language Arabic. According to some researchers, syntax is not bounded by critical period. The brain activity during brain scans in late learners of a second language versus early bilingual learners and monolinguals do not differ (Ortega, 2014).
 He does still sometimes finds himself switching between the two languages in the middle of the conversation or using specific words in Arabic when speaking English and vice versa. He remembers this occurring even when he was younger due to learning and speaking dual languages simultaneously.  According to the unitary hypothesis theory, the blend of two languages in a child's speech is because the child does not yet recognize that the two languages are two separate unity. This theory was proved moot by others like Redlinger and Park, who associate the interchange of both languages to a limited exposure of vocabulary in both languages, so when a child is at a loss for the proper word to explain their thoughts in one language they use their knowledge from their other language to make up for it (Rowald, 2014).
When asked if he had started learning English at a later age, would it have affected his ability to learn English, he discussed how acquisition at an early age is better for your fluency. However, our textbook says that this not necessary true. On the one hand, their is evidence of a process called myelination, which occurs between 10 and 12 years of age, where the white matter that encloses the brain develops to safe guard your nerves and allows for a more swifter transfer of information across the neural pathway. However, the different levels of motivation and types of social environment of adults verses children can also play a role in the distinction between early learners and late learners. Their is no absolute proof that biology is correlated to the acquisition of language, in the sense that there is no empirical evidence that proves a critical period truly exists. There are so many factors to consider to be able to pin it down solely to biology (Ortega, 2014). I believe that despite the inadequate instruction he grew up with in Dubai, his motivation, dedication, and positive environment later in life with his peers and teachers through high school and college have allowed him to successfully become fluent in English despite it being his second language.

Introducing Me

Hi. My name is Nadia Bhojwani. I am EC-6 Generalist and this is my blog!
                 

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