week 8

I thought it was extremely insightful of Toohey to analyze the practicalities of the education system and how the help or hinder the learning of ESL and ELL students.  Toohey explains how making children sit in an individual seat, with individual work actually goes against the sociocultural aspect of second language learning in that the students are actually discouraged to communicate and help one another.  I thought this was a surprising aspect of that teacher's classroom because it seems awfully independent for such young students.  I would have thought that these students should be encouraged to work together because they have such a similar, important goal: learning and acquiring the English language.  I thought it was surprising to read about Toohey's argument that having individual sets of items, instead of class sets, encouraged the idea that some student had "better" resources than others.  I felt that this was kind of a stretch, unless I read it wrong and it was only meant for a metaphor of the resources to speak English.  It confused me a little.  Toohey ends the article with quite a profound statement.  "My research suggests that the everyday, almost invisible practices of classrooms beginning very early might contribute to...long-term effects" (82).  The long-term effects Toohey is referring to is the student who did not want to work in a group or with a partner because he wasn't native.  He felt that he would be a burden on a native speaker, which is quite sad.  Learners need to feel comfortable in their environments, lowering their affective filter which, as Toohey proved, begins very early in the classroom.

Week 7

Overall, I thought chapter 1 in the Wong textbook was really interesting.  It covered a lot of material and I felt that I learned a lot in reading just the first chapter!

The first thing that really struck me was the idea of inequity in the school systems.  If students aren't in school, they aren't becoming strongly literate and the oppression just worsens.  "In the United States there are more African American young men in prison than in college" (3).  This struck me as unbelievably sad, because prior to that, Wong explains how Caucasians get lesser punishment for the same crimes.  This eventually led into the idea of linguistic racism, which is a new idea for me that was really interesting.  Do we treat those who are of lower power differently?  We certainly do discriminate with the idea of Standard English.  We don't treat African American Vernacular or other dialects of English as correct or even intelligible.  The stereotypes we place on those people after hearing them speak is both astounding and extremely sad.

Later on, Wong discriminates between Krashen's i+I (input hypothesis) and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.  I thought the table on page 31 was extremely helpful because on the surface, I thought these two theories seemed identical in most aspects.  Wong was able to draw out the differences and I learned to discriminate between the two.

I like the idea of Dialogic Pedagogy.  I think it certainly is important to use the community as a site for motivation.  As we've learned before, motivation is an extremely important aspect in second language acquisition.  We, as teachers of ELL students, want to provide meaningful lessons and messages to the students.  What better way to motivate and keep interest than by using meaningful information including the students' own environments?  Inquiry and exploration keep the interest and motivation levels high as well.  The dialogic approach really pushes students to explore and create meaningful messages, lowering their affective filter and eventually leading to much more solid learning than just memorizing grammar facts would do.

Week 6

In the articles we read this week, I felt very strongly about the way natives treat immigrants.  Eva, one of the women in the article, was quoted in the article, saying, "When I see that I have to do everything and nobody cares about me because-- then how can I talk to them?  I hear they doesn't care about me and I don't feel to go and smile and talk to them" (Pierce, 24).  I thought this was extremely sad that immigrants do not feel at all welcome in their new surroundings.  To learn language, you must practice all the time and if natives don't have the patience to speak with them, let alone make them feel like they belong here, immigrants won't learn as well as they should.  In this article, immigrants felt like the lowest on the social chain, getting the jobs, and interactions that make them feel powerless and unwelcome.  I feel that immigrants would learn so much more if they were treated with respect instead of contempt.

Week 4

I was surprised to read that personality is difficult to test when it comes to second language acquisition.  I would have that, without a doubt, being extroverted would make you more apt to being a better second language learner than someone who is introverted.  I feel that being anxious is also a part of your personality, so when reading the chapter by Lightbown, I wondered what they considered personality traits and what they didn't count as part of the personality.  When reading later on, I saw that motivation and attitude was not a part of personality, so I was confused on what was actually tested.  I feel that the reason they found inconclusive evidence was because they were choosy on what they tested and how those tests were related to second language learning.

I really liked watching the movie on Victor.  I felt it was crucial for our class to understand the critical period hypothesis.  The part that surprised me the most was that Victor learned to comprehend writing and spelling, but had an inability to produce meaningful conversation or any sort of meaningful messages.  I wonder how he felt about communication.  I wish the video would have shown more about this.  I wondered if he was irritated and wanted to produce speech and communicate or if he was indifferent to the idea of communication to a whole.  The documentary lead me to believe that he was a little bit of both, but didn't really go into much detail about it.