VBlog 3

Hello! I am Rachel Estopare and this is my Video Blog Entry 3: Interview with a teacher.

For this Blog, I had an elementary teacher/friend from Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, Ms. Sydney. She has been working as a Physical Education teacher for two years now and has a lot of experience working with ELLs. Sydney has worked in other environments with ELL’s such as after school tutoring and coaching so she has a wide variety of teaching experiences. Being in so many different situations gave Sydney a great understanding English Language Learners.
  In the video, Sydney mentions how age can affect students in different ways when it comes to learning. According to Ortega (2013), " Language aptitude and traditional intelligence may share a subset of academic abilities implicated in both types of test; language aptitude and early first language ability may share a common substrate of grammatical sensitivity and analytical kinds of abilities" (p. 165). Students who speak multiple languages can overlap in constructs and age can play a vital role in that. In the video Sydney also spoke about having to explain instructions in a different way for ELL’s or sometimes even simplify it based on their age. I related this back to the book and found it interesting her perspective versus Ortega’s (2013) when he mentioned, "even in the case of unrelated multiple languages, moreover, already knowing several languages can give an overall advantage, simply because better vocabulary learning strategies have already been developed by the time the L3 is being learned" (p.48). Every teacher goes through different experiences and for Sydney it wasn’t quite on path of the books, but different perspectives can help teach different ideas.

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

VLOG Entry 2

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to my second blog post.

I was able to interview an acquaintance from back home via Skype to find out a little more detail pertaining to English as a second language. Tami and her family moved to Indiana when she was 3 years old from France with little recollection of life before America. As I began to ask her questions as to why she only speaks English now, it became obvious it was by nature and her socialization growing up that she was greatly influenced to mainly speak English. Throughout this interview Tami explained that the environment she was placed in didn’t allow for her to be able to utilize her language, leaving her to only use English. Ortega (2013) says “Interlingual identifications, however, do not always involve a conscious judgment, as transfer will often occur at the subconscious level as well” (p.33). Which she alludes to when speaking about how with age and adaptation English subconsciously took over.

During our conversation I found the question “what similarities and differences do you notice between your first and second language?” to be a possible cause of her conversion to English. Ortega (2013) discusses “By definition L2 acquisition takes place in humans who already possess one or more languages. This being so, the mother tongue (and any other known 52 Summary 53 languages) universally influences the processes and outcomes of L2 learning” (pg. 52). Tami had said how the French and English languages have many common words so much that English almost felt natural and may have played a large role in English as her dominant language because L2 takes place with those who posses at least one language.

Ortega, L (2013). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Rutledge.

ENJOY MY VIDEO HERE

https://youtu.be/z20o946R20Y

Hi! I am Rachel. Thanks for checking out my video!