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.
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.
