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Reflection

Taking this course over the summer has definitely been hectic. Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed learning about what second language acquisition is and actually begin to understand second language acquisition a bit more. Before this course, all I knew was that I am bilingual due to the fact that I am able to understand two languages; I am able to read, speak, and write in both Spanish and English. However, I never really sat down to think about what my learning process was like with learning my second language until now. Throughout this course I got to learn more about actual influential factors that are involved in an individual’s learning process with a second language. I have learned about factors such as, age, crosslinguistics, cognition, and motivation to name a few. At first I found age to be an obvious factor since I have always thought that of course those who learn a second language at an early age will have better language proficiency than those who start later in life. To my surp...
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Interview with an ESL teacher

Click Here to watch my entry 3 video For my third interview, I spoke with Ms. Simms, who is an ESL teacher at Moreno elementary. When I asked her about the program at her school, she mentioned dual language, which is a program that teaches students in both their first and second language from kindergarten all through elementary, however this was not the case at Moreno elementary. Ms. Simmis mentions that because the dual language program is set up starting from kindergarten and in some schools since pre-kindergarten, this helps students transition smoothly from Spanish to English once they reach the upper grade levels. With this being said, Ortega mentions age playing an important role when learning a second language since there are studies that show younger children can have an advantage over adult learners when it comes to maintaining the language as they get older (2013). Therefore, as mentioned by Ms. Simmis, it is highly crucial that schools start to ease in English as a ...
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Interview with a Second Language Learner

Click Here to listen to my Entry 2 video! For this interview, I spoke with one of my coworkers who I believed would be a good source of information since she didn’t start primary school in the United States until she was in second grade. I found it interesting how Laura is an example of many who have been able to maintain her second language due to the fact that she began to learn it at the young age of 9 years old. As Ortega mentions “critical and sensitive period” as a time frame where there is a small window of opportunity in a person’s early years before reaching puberty in which they can with more ease learn a second language (2013, p.13). With this being said, as Laura mentioned, she had a better chance of retaining the English as her second language than her brother who was a teenager by the time he began to learn it. On another note, Laura mentions Spanish being her most dominant language which I found interesting since it aligns with Rowlands theory that “balanced b...
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Entry 1: Introduction

Hi my name is Nancy Escobar, I am going into my senior year at the University of Houston. I plan on graduation spring 2019 and I am eager to start my student teaching semester this fall! Click here to watch my introductory video.     As explained by Ortega, we tend to learn at least one more new language at some point in our lifetime due to certain circumstances (2013). I am proof of this idea due to the fact that even though I first learned Spanish, I still had to learn English because going to school in the United States one has to communicate for the majority of one's academic life in English. In addition, I must say that being able to learn a second language at a young age has made it possible to learn more than two languages. For example, in high school I took French class and I was surprised to see the many similarities between French, Spanish, and English. As mentioned by Ortega, many different languages despite their differences share common fundamentals, which ...
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