CUIN 4303

Click here to watch my video! Hello everyone! For this entry, I interviewed Mrs. Mack who has been teaching kindergarten at Oppe Elementary in Galveston ISD for over 25 years. One of the first questions I asked Mrs. Mack was how similar or different were her bilingual and monolingual students. Since Mrs. Mack teaches kindergarten, she shared that there are a lot of similarities when it comes to social skills, making friends, working with classmates on projects or activities, sharing supplies, as well as following school rules. Mrs. Mack also shared that her ELLs are more motivated to learn English in order to be like their peers. This reminded me of John Schuman's prediction that "the more acculturated a learner can become (that is, the closer to the target society and its members, socially, and psychologically), the more successful his or her eventual learning outcomes will be" (Ortega, 2011, page 59).  Mrs. Mack also mentioned that her ELLs can sometimes be...

Hello everyone! For this second blog, I interviewed my friend Alejandra who came to the United States from Monclova, Mexico as a toddler. Alejandra started learning English when she started pre-kindergarten. She was in bilingual classes for the rest of elementary school. As we went through the interview her answers to the questio ns I asked really started making connections to the scholars' opinions on the same topics. Overall, Alejandra did not struggle with English as one might think I bilingual would. Alejandra learned English in school but also had informal opportunities to learn by hanging out with friends. According to Ortega, "naturalistic learners learn the L2 through informal opportunities in multicultural neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces" while instructed learners "learn additional languages through formal study in a school"  (2013, page 6).    Alejandra believes that English and Spanish are very different from each other, which ...

From the video, I‘m sure you can tell that I grew up as a monolingual in the United States. I always wanted to learn Spanish and I tried my best throughout my schooling to get some kind of understanding of the language. Since I was only exposed to English and a little Spanish I was surprised to read, “in many parts of the globe, most children grow up speaking two or more languages simultaneously” Ortega (2013). I would hear my relatives speak Spanish and be in awe of the fact that they could be speaking English one second and then Spanish the next with no problem. When I little I caught onto little Spanish phrases my family used such as “loco en la cabeza” but I didn’t actually realize it was Spanish until later on in my life. Bilingual people have always amazed me because I have always seen speaking more than one language incredible. While I am sure it is not too late for me to learn Spanish it just seems somewhat impossible to me since I am already twenty years old. While I ...