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).