Entry 3: Interview with an ESL Teacher

Please view the following link for my interview with an ESL teacher.
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.

 

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.