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Entry 4: Final Course Reflection

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When I first began this course, I had no idea what second language acquisition was, especially the "acquisition" part. I made some assumptions just based on the course name. I thought this course would be about how to teach ELL's and how to implement certain strategies into the classroom. After beginning the course, I quickly learned that it was not only going to be about that but much more about the theory and the many different factors that play as a role in learning a second language. If you recall back to my entry 1 vblog, I stated that I was bilingual and throughout my elementary years, I was considered an ELL and was enrolled in ESL classes. As a previous ELL, I thought I had a good grasp of an understanding of the learning of a second language. To my surprise, there was so much I didn’t know. For starters, I had to first understand what SLA was and what it stood for. Ortega defined SLA as “…the scholarly field of inquiry that investigates the human capacity to l...
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Entry 3: Interview with Mr. Guest

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For this entry, I decided to interview a first grade teacher at the school I am student teaching at: Mr. Guest. Mr. Guest is a first grade teacher at Austin Parkway Elementary who has ELL students as well as native English speaking students. His class is considered a self-contained class meaning he teaches all subjects, ELA, math, science and social studies. Click Here to watch my interview with Mr. Guest! One thing that I did leave out with this interview was stating that Mr. Guest is monolingual and he is ESL certified. In the interview, Mr. Guest states that his ELL students have difficulty with academic level words. For example, words like data, bar graph, collection and more of the higher level words. According to the Bryan Brown: Full Interview on How Language, Identity, and Cognition Impact Students' learning, Mr. Brown states that "....rich parallels between the way students understand ideas and the way they can communicate them" (Brown, 2014). I believe th...
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Entry 2: Interview with a...

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Welcome back! For this entry, I decided to interview a classmate, Thom Tran. Thom Tran is a student at the University of Houston. Thom is Vietnamese. She is bilingual in Vietnamese and English. English is her second language and in this video, she shares her experiences learning English as a second languages and some challenges she has encountered. Interview with Thom Tran  My interview with Thom has allowed me to make connections with what I have read in this SLA class. As you saw in my video, Thom has informed us that she is bilingual in Vietnamese and in English. I have known Thom for a while now, so I know that Vietnamese is her mother tongue, or L1 and English is her L2. Thom grew up speaking Vietnamese until she began elementary school. Once she started elementary school, she began learning her L2 (English). Ortega states that "Children acquiring their first language complete the feat within a biological window of four to six years of age" (Ortega, 2013, p.1...
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Entry 1: Course Introduction

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Kenia Reyes's Blog Click here to watch the video As you saw in my video, I am fluent in both English and Spanish. According to Ortega (2013), most children grow up speaking one language only. This was partly the case for me. Since I was born in Guatemala, I was born in a household where everybody spoke nothing but Spanish. Once I moved to the states, I continued to speak Spanish up until I had to start elementary school. It was in elementary school where I began learning my L2. As I continued to read chapter one,  I came across a sentence that stood out to me. "Human language manifests itself in spoken, signed and written system across more than 6,500 languages documented to date" (Ortega, 2013, p.2). I found this to be very shocking, but I could also see how it is true. Recently, my mentor teacher and I were on the carpet with our students and we were getting to know them a little better. We decided to ask how many of them knew how to speak or write in a different...
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