Entry 2: Interview With An ELL

     I interviewed Marco, my fiance’s brother in law. Marco recently married my fiance’s sister and has been a part of the family for the past few years, so interaction with him has been plentiful, even regarding speaking of his experience in learning English. Marco came to the US from Mexico with his parents and two younger brothers when he was 13 years old as a teenager. His brothers had an easier time transitioning into a US school, and I believe this is due to the brain plasticity difference. He has spoken about his culture shock and difficulty in transition and fitting in throughout his education in the United States, so I was interested to hear his experience with second language acquisition.

     From this interview, I learned that he struggles with his spelling. I made the assumption that because Marco excels in verbal English, he must not struggle with spelling. I also assumed that math and science were probably difficult for him when he was transitioning into a US school due to his instruction being in English. However, contrary to my belief, Marco mentioned that when he started school in Dallas, it was easy for him to understand the math content because he already learned it in Mexico, and Mexico was ahead in the curriculum. 

     A connection I made between this interview experience and the text is the topic of negative feedback. Marco says that English speakers have helped him the most by correcting him to speak the right way and additionally, his spelling. In the fourth chapter of Ortega (2013), negative feedback is praised, as “the accumulating evidence suggests that providing negative feedback in some form results in better post-test performance than ignoring errors” (p.75). 

References:

Ortega, L. (2013). Understanding second language acquisition. Routledge.

 

Entry 1: Course Introduction

Brianna Baxter's Blog

     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.