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Blog:3 Teacher Interview

For my interview, I spoke with Ms. Hurtado. She is a sixth grade teacher at Hambrick Middle School. She teaches reading and writing, and has been doing so for the past 4 years since she began her teaching career. I never really talked to her before this interview. I only remembered her from a walk through we did in the ELA department. A walk through is when you go into about 4 or 5 different classes all in a time frame of about 20 minutes, and you takes notes of the culture in each class. Her class seemed to be oriented around students’ speech, language, and meanings. While I was in her class, I could tell she did some extra things such as give very thorough explanations, repeated a lot of instructions, and sometimes spoke in Spanish. I could tell that the students in her class were ELL. This made me remember, her because she seemed really passionate about her teaching. I felt I would get the most in depth feedback from her concerning the topic of second language learning. She gave me ...

Entry 2 Interview

ELL Interview For my entry 2, I interviewed my friend Baldemor. He is from Mexico and moved to the United states around the age of 9. It was interesting discussing his journey of English acquisition. Ortega states that children who are immersed in a new language at an early age can easily acquire the new language more naturally and faster than those who are older in age. Ortega refers to this time period as the "critical/sensitive periods" of language acquisition. My interviewee even mentioned this from his own personal observations without having any educational background. However, while he still feel like he successfully learn English easily, there are still some short- comings in his mastery of the language. He discusses how he can talk in English very well, and communicate with others without any problem. But, he still has trouble writing and sometimes reading in English. I believe this is because he learned English through a more naturalistic setting, instead of a cla...

Entry 1: Introduction

my presentation (you must click the arrow in the bottom right corner to move on)