Entry#3: Interview with Mrs. Aitken

This is my interview with Mrs. Aitken.

Reflection

After interviewing Mrs. Aitken, I learned more about the field of English Language Acquisition and its many nuances. In Mrs. Aitken’s case because she was primarily a kindergarten teacher in the past and is a first-grade teacher currently, she could naturally teach a child English because it’s naturally how you would teach these grade levels. At the grade levels she had taught it’s natural to teach using many visuals, modeling, and having them work with their peers.

Through using many visuals, English language learners are given visual input that could go along with oral messages, this leads to better comprehension among English language learners. According to Ortega, “learners obtain comprehensible input mostly through listening to oral messages that interlocutors direct to them and via reading written texts that surround them, such as street signs, personal letters, books and so on” (Ortega, 2009, p. 59). Looking around her classroom, almost everything is labeled with a little picture of the item and with the word of what it is.

According to Mrs. Aitken, she is constantly assessing her students. Assessment doesn’t necessarily need to be a product of some sort, but it could just be a check for understanding. In the SLA field itself, “because there are so many ways to measure proficiency, the field of SLA is left with considerable difficulty in comparing studies,” which means that there is no true way to assess what a child truly knows regarding their language proficiency (Gass, 2008, p. 72). So, it’s a good idea for Mrs. Aitken to constantly assess her students as she would be able to see what they truly know or not know.

Overall, I really enjoyed my interview with Mrs. Aitken. I did think there was an actual ESL specialist at the school, but I found out there wasn’t any so many teachers at this school are just ESL certified. In Mrs. Aitken’s case she had only worked with kindergartners and first-graders and shared her perspective of working with English language learners at these age levels. This leads me to wonder how it would be to teach an older English language learner and if it would be any different.

Entry #2: Interviewing an English Language Learner

Here is a link to my video.

For my second entry I decided to interview my older brother. My brother is two years older than me and was born in Thailand and came to America around 18-20 months old. I wondered if his experience growing up was any different than mine just for the fact that he is older than me and experienced how it was for my parents to immediately come from Cambodia to America and be amongst the English language. After interviewing my brother and hearing about his English language learning experience I feel that his experience was very similar to mine. He grew up only hearing Khmer but heard English around him, so naturally he was able to pick up English easily through friends and TV. He was exposed to Khmer and English “within a biological window of four to six years of age” (Ortega, 2009, p. 12) so learning both Khmer and English could have been easy just because he was very young. One thing that I have read that I feel holds very true is that “teachers can only hope to teach successfully what learners are developmentally ready to learn” which basically means if the learner is ready to learn they can learn (Ortega, 2009, p. 138). In my brother’s case, because children naturally want to learn, he was ready to learn and acquire English. The approach of learning English was through a naturalistic approach and when he started school he learned English through an Instructional approach (Ortega, 2009). The neighborhood that we live in was also full of English language learners from many different backgrounds so not knowing much English when we were younger did not make us uncomfortable. As my brother stated, half of the students at the elementary school were English language learners so the environment was conducive to our learning. At the same time, living in America you just hear English all around you so it’s understandable why he feels that being immersed in the language is the way to go when learning another language.   

Entry #1

Hello my name is Chenda Chab.
This blog is for my Second Language Acquisition Class.
Here's my blog entry #1

The link to my video!