Hi everyone! Welcome back to my blog. To see my interview with an ELL teacher click here ! For my interview, I talked to my mentor teacher, Kelli Recchilongo who is a first grade teacher at Foster Elementary. I have worked with her throughout all of student teaching. We have three English Language Learners in our class and a few ESL students as well. One thing that I found in my interview is how important it is to be patient when you are working with ELL and ESL students. They deserve the same education as other students, but it might take them a little longer to process everything. In the text, according to the usage-based theory, learning constructions and their meanings does not require any specialized innate knowledge of linguistic rules or principles. One of the skills needed for this is analogical reasoning which allows the student to compare across different constructions and work out what commonalities are. This happens through socializing with their classmates. Rowland, C....
Entry 2 Hi everyone! For my second blog entry, I interviewed a family friend of mine named Joe. Joe grew up with his grandparents who were new to the U.S. from Mexico. His native language is Spanish and he spoke only Spanish until about first grade. Joe grew up in a city outside of Austin and his class had about 30-40 students. The majority of the class spoke Spanish. Throughout the interview Joe talked about how the process was for him to try to learn a language that was so different than what he was used to. Joe gave some advice to me as a future teacher to remember to be patient with ELLs. Take the time to work with them and to understand where they are coming from. Part of being patient made me think about Ortega talking about working memory in the textbook. The text talks about how working memory helps us integrate new information with known information already encoded in long-term memory (2013, p. 90). This helps explain why it is so important that we give students the time t...