Entry 1: Course introduction
Damaris Duarte
Welcome to my first entry blog!
Click HERE to watch my first VLOG
Welcome to my first entry blog!
Click HERE to watch my first VLOG
University of Houston✨Class of '19✨Married to a Musician 🎺✨Goldendoodle✨God's Reckless 💛
Hi Damaris! I really love the connection you made between yourself and your current student. I think that it’s so important to be able to understand where your students are coming from, and to be able to connect with them on something in order to really be able to help them. It sounds like you were very much an instructed learner of English (Ortega, 2013, p.6) which is great because it clearly stuck. I also find that although you lost your Spanish when you first began learning English, you did not let that discourage you from learning it again. I’m so excited to see the different ways that second language acquisition can play a role in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Noor! I think it is very important for the teacher to have a connection with the students especially when learning a new language. I think that the connection between teacher and student is critical in the learning process. When i was learning Spanish, my teacher really didn't care whether we learned the material or not, she just gave us words to memorize and expected us to learn them by the next week. I think this was detremental to my learning process in Spanish because it caused me to become less motivated and I really just coasted through the class and lost everything i learned in that class.
DeleteI can definitely relate to your experience, Asia. When I took Spanish classes in middle school, I did not retain any of the information that I learned and I have lost all of the language that I had learned. I think in that case, I find that sometimes instructed learning (Ortega, 2013, p.6) is not the way to go because you are sometimes just being graded on how much you can learn in such a short amount of time and it’s not actually trying to learn the material, just memorizing it for the next test and moving on.
DeleteThank you Noor! As educators we must keep growing and expanding our minds! Even though I feel like have fallen behind in Spanish, I have been practicing during student teaching. We currently have a student from South America and during Wise Time, I take the time out to translate to the student. I do get stuck on some words but I find a way to explain my self. The student is at " human capacity to learn languages other than the first, during late childhood, adolescence or adulthood, and once the first language or languages have been acquired." (Ortega, 2013, P.1)
DeleteHello Asia, thank you for taking time out and replying! Yes, I also agree it is very important to create a relationship with your students in order to gain their trust. If we gain their trust we are able to teach better because they are willing to listen. You and I share something in common, I also coasted through class. I was able to understand math but when it cam to Language Arts, I slipped by. Being able to experience this, we are able to detect and prevent which students are coasting by as well.
DeleteDarmaris, it is such a wonderful thing how you reached out to your student and continued to help her in other subjects- I bet your mentor appreciates your help! Rowland stated, “[children] have to learn that changes in meaning may be signaling by sequencing words in different ways: man bites dog is newsworthy, dog bites man is not” (Rowland, 2). I remember having the stress of differentiating and identifying words during my ESL sessions during early Elementary- especially when referring to terms such as they’re, their, and there. Are there other students in your classroom that are ESL in your student-teaching? How would you handle these students when you have your own classroom (would you have small-group instructions)?
ReplyDeleteRowland, Caroline. Understanding child language acquisition. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2014.
Hello Michelle! Thank you for your comment! Yes, the experience I'm getting now is super helpful for my future encounters with ESL students. I will definitely try my best to have a small group for my students who struggle with learning a second language. Depending on the child's first language I would try to find similarities so the child is able to compare the topics and vocabulary. My goal is to get familiarize with a second language and according to "SLA research, it has unveiled a number of universal influences that help shape the nature, pace, route and finish line in the path towards learning a second language." (Ortega, 2013, p.9)
DeleteHi Damaris, I was very surprised to hear you say that you forgot how to speak Spanish once you learned English. I understand if you do not use another language often enough you are more likely to forget some things. I think it is great that you are still able to help the student in your own classroom that does not speak English as her first language. Gass and Selinker (1994) discussed how teachers have become more aware that learning another language requires more than depending on student’s memorization of rules and materials (p. 3). You yourself have been through the process and can understand what your students are going through in a way that other teachers will not be able to.
ReplyDeleteDevon thank you so much for responding to my video! Yes Devon, its true! My Spanish vanished on me growing up. My parents still do not speak English but understand everything therefore I did not have to speak Spanish to them. I started practicing more and more with the students and if I stumble on a word I do not know, I simply Google and continue to teach. "A number of disciplines within the language sciences aim to provide an accurate and complete description of language at all its levels, such as sounds (phonetics and phonology), minimal grammatical signs (morphology), sentences (syntax),
Deletemeanings (semantics), texts (discourse analysis) and language in use
(sociolinguistics, pragmatics)" (Ortega, 2013, P2)