https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VHrgCEkeAFTOl1tlmAyNqPFhJE_P_Pw5/view?usp=sharing
Mrs. Chapman uses her experience in
many different grades and recent ESL certification to connect the following concepts.
My interviewee stated that her bilingual
and monolingual students are cognitively different by the way they actively use
both languages. She mentions that you can watch the students transition from
one language to another in academic performance and see it happening. Students who
are successful with this transfer between languages in academics may be exhibiting
signs of automaticity, however, as mentioned
in Ortega (2013), automaticity is not to be mistaken with accelerated or speedy
behavior (p.85).
My interviewee
also mentioned that her students struggle academically when there is a lack of
motivation and participation with parents at home due to a language barrier. I
can infer that this struggle at school may be due to lack of practice at home,
and when most practice is in a school setting with limited time per day. In the
fifth chapter of Ortega (2013), it is stated that “prolonged and
repeated practice changes the knowledge representation itself by making the
stored knowledge become more elaborated and well specified” (p.85). For example, when
homework is given, it is with the intention that we are moving academic
concepts into our students’ long-term memory by giving opportunity for
independent practice. I infer that students who are not able to build their
long-term memory and explicit-declarative components of their L2 may experience
difficulty in academics.
From this insight into Mrs. Chapman’s
personal experiences, I have determined that is important to allow students
many opportunities to practice second language acquisition in class due to the
possibility of there being a lack of practice at home.
References:
Ortega, L.
(2013). Understanding second language acquisition. Routledge.
