CUIN 4303: Second Language Acquisition

For this assignment, I interviewed my sister, Ashley, who teaches 6 th  grade science. She has been ESL certified for 5 years and works with ELL students regularly. Motivation is something that we spent the majority of the interview talking about, and it is a leading factor when working with ELL students. My sister emphasized the fact that many immigrant students that she works with are very intrinsically motivated to learn English. This is because when they come to America, it is important to, “make a better life for yourself, and they know that that avenue for that is education.” They also want to be successful because it is internally important to them to do well. They desire approval from their teachers and peers and want to know that they are making progress.   She also points out that some of the motivation that you see in ELLs can be categorized as extrinsic. These children feel the need to learn the language so that they can assist their parents with c...

For the video log, I interviewed 20-year-old Gabby who learned English as a second language. Gabby originally spoke Spanish at home with her parents until she started going to public school in the United States at age 5. She is a bilingual speaker who is currently proficient in both languages. Gabby explained that from kindergarten to 4th grade, she was only in Spanish speaking classes and did not fully understand American culture. She did not spend a lot of time having informal conversations with English speakers until the 5th grade when she was placed in a general education classroom.  Ortega explains that, "naturalistic learners learn the L2 through informal opportunities in multicultural neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces" (Ortega, 2013, p.6). It was not until Gabby was placed in a classroom with native speakers  when the cultural aspects associated with the English language became apart of Gabby's daily lifestyle.  Gabby also talked about some of the activit...

While I am not fluent in a second language myself, I have always been fascinated by other languages. I took Spanish in high school and I enjoyed the process of learning another language as well as practicing it with my peers. During my free time in high school, I attempted to learn Japanese on YouTube, but I did not get very far as the language is very different from English. Ortega (2013) explains the differences between second language acquisition and bilingualism, which I did not consider prior to reading this chapter. He explains that bilingualism is when a young child learns two languages at the same time, thus becoming fluent in both of them. When I was trying to learn Spanish and Japanese, that was second language acquisition and I was unable to simply pick up on the language in the same way that a young child would while being exposed to both languages in casual settings. I am glad that the book began by distinguishing between these two terms, because I would not have separ...

Hello everyone! My name is Morgan Smith and I am studying teaching and learning at the University of Houston's main campus. I plan on graduating in the spring of 2019. I will be starting student teaching in the fall, and I am anxious to learn as much as I can about learning a second language before I am in the classroom full time. Click here to watch my introductory video!