week 10

I thought that this chapter brought up a lot of historical viewpoints that were interesting and useful to read about as a preservice TESOL teacher.  I agree that students, and people in general, learn best by doing.  I thought the idea of not having a "stage-approach" was interesting.  How am I supposed to teach without having an order set in which to teach it?  I know that having rigid curriculum won't work in helping students learn, but I think you need to have some sort of ordering when teaching, allowing it to stray if valuable teaching moments present themselves.  I thought that Wong was dead on when saying that learning through doing involves learning how to speak  in the language through participation in discourse communities.  I think it is important for second language learners to show initiative in learning by participating as much as possible.  However, it is on the teacher to make a diverse community that encourages all backgrounds and opinions.  As stated later, the students won't speak up for themselves if they feel that they are oppressed in any way.  As much as we can't control the environment outside of the classroom, we can surely create a space of inclusion so that students feel valuable, that both languages have significant value to them.  I liked that the chapter said that teachers of ESOL have as much to learn as they have to teach.  We will constantly be learning about other cultures and languages, as well as methods of teaching and what works best.  We will learn to reach our students in time and will learn to develop different questioning techniques, just as our students will grasp the language better in time.

alternative assignment

Article 1: The Linguistic Development of Genie

Summary: This article describes how children who have grown up under severe isolation, also known as ‘wild’ or ‘feral’ children, have the most dramatic stories about language acquisition.  Not only have these children shown signs of majorly decreased language capabilities, but also experience other sensory losses, especially those which must be acquired.  This article briefly mentions the case studies of Victor Itard as well as Caspar Hauser, but because they are dated back more than a century and a half, they lack general information that linguists would research today.  It goes into detail about Genie’s case study, which is the most recent, most conclusive case, as she was born in 1957.  She was malnourished, appeared to be seven years old when she was 13 years and 7 months old, did not speak, cry, or make any vocal sounds, and could not chew food or stand erect.  Her father had an intolerance to noise and physically punished Genie if she made any sounds whatsoever, explaining her silence.  She had extremely limited human contact and was barked at instead of spoken to.  When hospitalized, she grew rapidly, physically, mentally and emotionally.  At the hospital, Genie had poor control over her speech organs as well as the muscular control needed for eating.  Genie slowly acquired language.  Through testing, it is concluded that she had learned about negation, coordinating conjunctions, prepositional relations, pluralization of nouns, modification, possessives, superlative and comparative, and relational adjectives.  Genie learned through visual/written language (such as flashcards) as well as speech.  Genie had enormous difficulty with controlling the speech organs as well as the air flow needed to produce her voice.  Her speech is far from normal, but is much improved.  The order in which Genie learned language and functions is listed and many examples are given.  Language can be acquired after the critical age, but does not seem native-like after this age has passed.

Citation:

Susan Curtiss, Victoria Fromkin, Stephen Krashen, David Rigler and Marilyn Rigler,  (Sep.,         1974). Language. Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 528-554

Article 2: Critical Evidence: A Test of the Critical Age Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition

Summary: This article describes a test done on data from a 1990 census.  The census used responses from 2.3 million immigrants with Spanish or Chinese language backgrounds.  The article wanted to test the key prediction of the hypothesis, which was that the age of immigration deeply affected the second-language acquisition.  The results of the test on this was that the age did not make as much as a difference in acquisition as the authors had estimated, but there was a surprisingly linear effect for level of education before emigrating to America.  This aspect shows that a higher level of education before immigration greatly improves the ability to pick up and acquire the language.

Citation:

Ellen Bialystok, Kenji Hakuta, Edward Wiley. (January 2003). Critical Evidence: A Test of the    Critical Age Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition. Psychological Science,Vol.              14, No. 1

Article 3: A Test of the Critical Period Hypothesis for Language Learning

Summary: This article is about a study done that examines the relevance of the critical period for language learning.  It specifically deals with critical age hypothesis for proficiency of English-speaking among immigrants in the United States.  This study also uses census data from 2000.  Four patterns emerged from this study.  First, proficiency in English declines monotonically with age at migration for the immigrants. Second, within country of origin, the patterns are very similar for both men and women. Third, the variability in the proportion proficient in English across ages at time of immigration is greater the older the age.  This may have occurred because there are fewer immigrants after middle age.  Fourth, among non-Mexican immigrants, the decline in proficiency with age at migration is initially shallow (up to age 8), then shows a much sharper decline that gradually diminishes, until the marginal effect of age at immigration disappears after the age of 40. On the other hand, among Mexican immigrants there is a sharp decline in proficiency with age at immigration until about age 16, with little change after this. These patterns suggested important differences between immigrants from Mexico and all other countries.  This study suggests that if a ‘critical period’ for language learning is defined as an age at which there is a sharp decline in the ability of immigrants to obtain proficiency in speaking English, no such critical period exists.  Ability to become proficient in the language declines with the age of migration to America.

Citation:

Chiswick, Barry, Miller, Paul. (Feb, 2008).  A Test of the Critical Period Hypothesis for                                             Language Learning. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Vol. 29,         No. 1

Article 4: Age Effects on Second Language Acquisition: Critical Issues under Debate

Summary: This article is a synthesis of the information and studies that have been done regarding critical age hypothesis.  It includes the ideas of four books.  It states that there are five positions in the critical period hypothesis that other authors and researchers have studied.  These include the following ideas: (1) The younger a person is, the better, overall, they will acquire the language.  (2) The older the person is, the better, overall, for acquiring language.  (3) The younger a learner is, the better for some respects.  (4) The younger the learner, the better in the long run.  (5) The qualitative change position, which details that after a certain age, qualitative changes occur in the learning process.  The article then details what researchers have said and found in every idea related to the critical period.  It concludes by stating that there are several viewpoints and supporting evidence for every view. 

Citation:

Miraleix, I. (2011). Age Effects on Second Language Acquisition: Critical Issues under Debate. Language Teaching, Vol. 44, No. 1

                                                                                                    

week 9

I felt that the problem posing approach to learning is a great way for students to be able to come to their own conclusions and own the language.  The students feel is if they need to communicate and therefore they learn and enjoy learning a lot more.  They connect with the material because problem posing questions and strategies allow students time to think and time to create opinions about the material, making them learn much more in the short period of time.  I enjoyed this reading because I felt that I received a lot of insight on how to teach ELL classrooms that are tested in a high stakes testing criteria.  The chapter gave advice on how to teach students that will be tested.  It suggested being aware of what is on the test.  I think this is incredibly important because you can steer conversations to include testing materials without forcing the class to follow an unbending schedule.  Wong states in chapter 3 that these materials will spontaneously arise.  I disagree with this slightly.  I felt that if you need the students to learn the test materials, teachers might have to work these materials in by looking for opportunities, not by hoping they spontaneously arise.  Another strategy was to teach beyond the test.  Although this is a great idea, I feel that this might be quite a lofty goal for an ELL class.  It's a great idea on paper...teach more than the test requires, but I can't see myself cramming materials in the class so that they know way more than the testing materials.  I want my students to have a firm grasp on all of the material, not force more than they can handle.  I guess this depends on the level of the class and how quickly they learn the material.  Some classes may get further than others.  The last strategy was to pose the test as a problem.  I think this is problematic in some cases.  Wong talks about showing the statistics to the students as a motivator.  However, I think that showing ELL students the fail rates of the test might become a stressor or a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I know that if I were a student, trying to learn a new language, I wouldn't want to hear about the probability of me not passing the test.  That would stress me out and, as we know, a high affective filter doesn't allow for much learning.

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.