Entry 4: Reflection

In this class I have learned a lot about second language and how it effects people not knowing another language. When I first started working at the rec center I had some parents that just would not learn English and I never understood why they did not want to learn it. I never understood the process that it takes and how hard it maybe. Especially if you have been raised your whole life not knowing it and did not learn it as a child. I never knew the facts behind learning a second language and that learning has so many different factors that have to do with learning a new language, like, the motivation and the age of someone. 

I have learned so much in this class on how I will take certain things and incorporate them into my classroom so that anyone that is a second language leaner can be successful in my classroom. I have seen many different factors and how teachers use motivation in their classroom to help their students and I would have never thought about the certain things that teachers do to help their second language learners learn. When I did my interview with a Bilingual teacher I got to see how she has taken English books and have pasted the Spanish translation onto them because they did not make that book in Spanish but the teacher needed to read that book for the lesson. She used brownie points for her kids to get motivation but then she also used individual positive rewards for the students that needed that extra push and saw them showing grit in learning something difficult for them. Seeing how that teacher works so hard for her students and all of her ideas really influenced me on how to set up my future classroom and ideas that I can use.

I think the topic in this class where great and I learned a lot about them. I think motivation was a big topic in this class and the teacher’s part in the classroom. I liked how we did those topics and I feel like that is what I took away the most from this class was learning about the background of second language acquisition and how it has all these factors involving the students learning. The thing that sticks with me the most is motivation and what can teachers do to motivate their students into learning because if students do not have the motivation then they are not going to learn anything because they do not want to listen or be at school. Making that classroom environment and making the connections with students is very important and something that I am going to strive to achieve when I have my own classroom. 

The Vblogs made me learn a lot because you could see how teachers today are dealing with ESL and how they are making changes to their classroom. I also learned a lot from the blog where we had to interview someone that did not know English as a first language. I learned a lot about how schools have changed and that not all schools had an ESL program for their student’s and how those certain students learned when they could not understand anything that was going on in the classroom.