SLA Introduction Vlog!
In this video, you will get to know a little bit about me. I wanted to tell you about my experience with acquiring a second language thus far in my academic career. I am monolingual, and I grew up with no second language understanding. I have lived in Texas my entire life, so I did know that some letter combinations that usually sounded one way in English, didn't always sound that way due to a large Spanish culture in my communities.
I have lived in Texas my entire life, so I did know that some letter combinations that usually sounded one way in English, didn't always sound that way due to a large Spanish culture in my communities.
When I was in high school, I tried to learn Spanish as a
second language. I took a class in high school for three years, although I did
not learn much because I just tried to pass my tests. I did not practice the
language either, and that made me forget most of the information that I
learned.
I look forward to learning a second language in this class,
because it will give me a chance to try to understand what English language
learners feel like in a normal American classroom. I did get a chance to feel
what this felt like once in my life, when I traveled to Africa. I went without
any understanding of the National language. I went weeks trying to follow along
to what everyone around me was saying and it was very overwhelming. I had to become
confident enough to speak up and ask for clarification on something when I was
unsure of what anyone was saying!
I look forward to learning with the rest of you!
Amasaganalo! (thank you- Amharic)
(please click on the above link to view my video!)
Mucho gusto Emily. I think you need to explain to us a little more what you wanted to say about Texas. Even though the idea is repeated, I do not understand what you are trying to say. Learning any language requires constant work and what people usually learn is the academic version of the language and then once you move to a specific community, we learn those expressions that are part of the informal version of the dialect or regional dialect. For example, you can learn present perfect in Spanish and learn to say ¨no he encontrado trabajo aún.¨(I have not found a job yet) but when you go to Spain, you soon realize that they use the present perfect to mean simple past "No te he encontrado" (I did not run into you). However, if you speak using the more standardized form of the language, most speakers of that language will understand you. Thus, the most important part of a language to develop is to communicative competence, the ability to do things with the language in specific contexts.
ReplyDeleteDr. Avellaneda,
DeleteWhen I speak about Texas, I am mainly referring to the fact that Spanish has a bigger impact on the culture here, since we are so geographically close to Mexico. The spanish influence introduced spanish into my life without me noticing much of it, for example, the spelling and pronounciation of food at spanish restaurants or the pronounciation of different names of cities or streets that are from the Spanish culture.
Yes, I remember now that my high school spanish teacher used the terms informal and formal when referring to different dialects. I would like to be able to atleast hold a conversation in spanish. When you say learning expressions of a specific community, it reminds me of the videos online that have grandparents trying to explain the slang that a lot of our youth uses. It also makes me realize that learning a language can be extremely difficult because people aren't always meaning what they are saying.
Languages have regional, social, and register varieties. Thus a person in Spain can speak in a formal way but at home which is different from someone in Spain speaking informally with a relative at home.
DeleteHi Emily
ReplyDeleteI also took 3 Spanish classes in high school, and the same as you did; I took them as a requirement and didn’t take away a lot because I only put in the effort to pass. Mere memorization and occasionally speaking aloud did not do much for me. I came away from Spanish 1,2,and 3 remembering only a few grammar rules and some new vocabulary. I am mostly hoping that once I graduate, I will finally have the time and invest it on my own resources to learn the language. What I observed in the Spanish classes in high school is that while there were work sheets and materials designed to help us learn Spanish, the lack of constant practice and lack of proper exposure only stunted the growth and expansion of my Spanish. It also does not help that for you and I, we were in high school and well beyond the “biological window of four to six years of age” (Ortega, 2013, p. 12) that is viewed as the most ideal for taking in another language other than our own. If we apply what we have learned in our education courses, that is, modeling, consistency, and practice, into this course, I think we could come out better.
References: Ortega, Lourdes. Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge, 2013. Print
I definitely agree with you Tracy. I think that if we had taken spanish classes in elementary or pre-school and continued to practice it throughout school and into high school, we would have had a much better chance at remembering the lanugage.
DeleteThe practicing of the language is what really stunted my growth in learning another language as well. I did not practice the language other than when my dad forced me too, and that was only when we would travel to Mexico for vacation. (My dad loved to encourage us to learn spanish because he learned when he was in his twenties by his teammates on his baseball team.)
Tracy,
DeleteIt is interesting to hear your experiences with learning a second language in school. Much like you, my main take away from my high school Spanish courses was the credit I received from completion. I do not feel like I actually learned Spanish, which is why I still struggle with it today. Ortega states, “One way to investigate humans’ capacities for learning second language is to inspect the oral and written records learners produce when people use the new language” (Ortega, 2013, p6). Based off of this idea, school is great place to investigate our language capabilities, however, it heavily depends on the teacher and how committed they are to their students’ learning experience.
Hi Emily,
ReplyDeleteWhen I was watching your video, I noticed you said the Spanish you learned in your high school Spanish class, was not even close to what native speakers around you spoke. That is very true because coming from myself who is bilingual in Spanish, I do not speak the language in the way high school Spanish classes teach their students. They teach their students formal Spanish, as opposed to slang Spanish, which is what you normally hear. On another note, coming from a bilingual speaker, I as well have noticed my proficiency in the Spanish language to not be so great. However, in my case my Spanish started to slow down when I was in about middle school, as oppose to you when you were in high school. Ortega implies that we lose the plasticity in our brains by year nine (Ortega, 2013, p.13). Which seems about right, in relation to when my Spanish started to not be as proficient.
Hopefully, by the end of this course you'll be able to regain the Spanish back you learned in high school.
References: Ortega, Lourdes. Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge, 2013. Print
Hi Priscilla, that’s ironic how you said that the Spanish you learned in your high school Spanish class was not close to the Spanish you speak. As I said in my video, when I took Spanish in high school and would ask my Spanish speaking friends to help me they would always say what we were being taught wasn’t how they spoke Spanish at home. Referring to what you mentioned about you and Melissa proficiency in Spanish, Ortega said, “There is robust evidence that L1 transfer cannot radically alter the route of L2 acquisition but it can impact the rate of learners’ progress along their natural” (Ortega, 2013, p. 34).
DeletePriscilla, I see how your second language started to slip away. Another reason this may have happened is because you may not have practiced it as much. Ortega (2013) says that a mixture of immersion and instruction are needed in order to successfully maintain a language. I had a weird though when I read that in the book. I thought, if a person is monolingual and doesn't read, watch tv, or talk to anyone for many years, then they will probably be very behind cognitively, even though they may think in this language. I started thinking that this is probably due to the fact that they are not using a large vocabulary, and they are not continually learning. I feel as though I learn a new word in my native language all of the time, so this would also need to be true in a second language, if not more true.
DeleteRachel,
ReplyDeleteI can relate to your experience in the Spanish class you took in high school. As a Spanish speaker myself, I opted to take Spanish in high school as an easy A. I figured since I already knew the language, that the class would be fairly easy to me. As in your case, I noticed the Spanish that was being taught wasn't exactly the same as the one I knew. The program I believe you were talking about was Rosetta. In my experience, my teachers used Rosetta and I feel as if it really didn't help me at all. And if I felt this as a native speaker, I can only imagine students like yourself since this was your L2. In Ortega, it states that many people around the globe many people may learn, forget, and relearn a new number of languages that are not their mother tongue (2011, p.1). I feel as this may apply to you and I hope you are provided with the opportunity to become more fluent in Spanish. Since Texas is a state where a number of people speak more than one language, I think it is great that you are learning about L2 learners and how to make your classroom a better place for them.