Welcome to my blog! My name is Brianna Baxter and I am a
senior at the University of Houston. I am a third-grade student teacher at
Dickinson Elementary School in LCISD, the district I attended from Kindergarten
to graduation. I enjoy working with this age and I see myself enjoying third
grade through sixth grade the most.
As you can see from my vBlog, I am monolingual. I remember “learning”
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider in Spanish when I was in daycare at age 3 or 4. I have a silly
home video of me singing the song, and it sounds barely intelligible, but language
is first acquired as simple phonetics to children. “Child language acquisition
happens in a predictable pattern, broadly speaking. First, (…) infants attune
themselves to the prosodic and phonological makeup of the language to which
they are exposed…” (Ortega, 2013, p.3). Even though I was not an infant, the
first step of repeating this unfamiliar language was sounding out the
phonological makeup that I heard.
In the textbook, it states that “Naturalistic learners learn
the L2 through informal opportunities in multicultural neighbourhoods, schools
and workplaces, without ever receiving any organized instruction on the
workings of the language they are learning. Instructed learners learn
additional languages through formal study in school or university, through
private lessons and so on.” (Ortega, 2013, p.6). In my case that I provided in
my vBlog involving my fiancé knowing a good amount of the Spanish language, it
is appropriate to say that he learned it the informal way. We are taught the
formal way in high school, which differs immensely from “conversation Spanish”.
References:
Ortega, L. (2013). Understanding second language
acquisition. Routledge.
