Vlog Entry 3

In this blog number 3 I had the privilege of speaking with my mentor teacher who is a ESL certified teacher here at Fiest elementary school in Cy-Fair ISD. She has been a teacher for 28 years and has been ESL certified for the last 12 years. We spoke about how things can be different in a classroom of ESL students when making sure that they are getting everything they need to be successful. We spoke first about the content areas that ELL students often struggle with and why they may do this. She said she has always seen students struggle in the content area of science. In regards to cognition she recognizes that students struggle the most in her class when it comes to expressing their understanding of what they have just learned. This is due to their lack of content vocabulary, which is where many of their struggles start in learning new things in school. She pointed out how both monolingual and bilingual typically succeed much quicker in math when it comes to number operations. This is easier for them since they do not have to focus on the vocabulary but just the numbers and there is a set operation for them to follow. I thought I learned a lot from this interview with my teacher. She pointed out many things that bilingual students struggle with and how to help them get through these in the classroom. The best strategy we talked about was the emphasis of vocabulary to the children. Ortega states that he “typically found that learners know more words receptively than productively, particularly if they are infrequent or difficult words, and that this gap becomes smaller as proficiency develops.” (Ortega 2015) This shows that it does not matter which subject that they are looking at, vocabulary is the place to start.

Check out he video with my teacher here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InDl-cxcnnA

Vlog entry 2

I had the privilege of interview a longtime family friend and neighbor for this entry of the class. The woman I interviewed learned English as a second language to Spanish growing up in Miami. She now owns her own home health care business and she says that her knowing two languages has helped her be so successful in the business of home health. She spoke in the video about how she thinks the culture of Miami had a lot to do with how she learned English and I thought that was interesting. I think we think of Houston as being such a diverse place we do not realize that there are also places that although have many people who speak a different language, they can be unified in the second language most of the community speaks. Something big that she touched on in the video is the age that she learned the English language. She said that she only knew Spanish until she started school in pre-k and that is where her English learning began, and that mostly all of her classmates were doing the same. She states that she thinks starting at a young age helped her and she said the “younger the better” when it comes to learning the second language in her opinion. Ortega also states that there is a “loss of plasticity undergone by human brains by year nine of life” (Ortega. P12) so he shows that this gap after age nine they have found that it is in fact harder for the brain to obtain a second language. I agree with this since I was someone who wasn’t introduced to a second language until are 12, I think had I been earlier I would have remembered more and been more successful.
Watch my interview here! https://youtu.be/VE7rJ6dNIqc

Entry 1 Second language acquisitions

Hello! My name is Gabrielle Salton and I am a senior here at The University of Houston, I graduate May 9th and I can't wait! I am currently students teaching at Fiest Elementary school in Cy-Fair school district. I am in a reading and writing 3rd grade class and loving every second of it! I have no gotten the opportunity to work with ELLs exclusively but I have been lucky enough to watch the teacher next door to me teach them and I feel like I have been able to learn a lot from that! I do not speak any other languages but did take three years of Spanish in high school so I do think i can understand the language pretty well, just not be able to respond in any way. I am excited for what I will learn in this class in this upcoming semester! The last language class I took last semester was very knowledgeable and I hope it helps me reach my goal of being a ESL certified teacher.
 Click here to watch my first blog entry!
https://youtu.be/YxThIFY1SRs