I interviewed Mrs. Meanor, an Elementary school
teacher in FBISD. She has been a teacher for over fourteen years. In her
fourteen years as a public-school educator she has had countless exposure to
English Language Learners of many different languages and cultures.
During my dialogue with my MT, she said her ELL
students have the most difficulty with academic language. These
students, in most cases, do not experience a lot of difficulty with social
language when communicating with their peers. However, these same English
Language Learners are not able to understand the academic language their peers have been exposed to in the same setting. Researchers have studied "how language gradually develop the capacity to transform oral or everyday language and mobilize it into the range of formal and written registers that are required for successful functioning in academic contexts" (Ortega, 2013, pg.234). ELL student may
be able to follow along with math being taught in standard
algorithm form because numbers do not pose a huge problem, but will have
trouble deciphering which operation to choose in word problems, or if there were a prompt. In situations
as this, the student has not learned the academic language needed to approach
the problem. For students to succeed in school they have to understand
academic language. For ELL, teachers may have to use more visuals and present
more background knowledge activities so students understand the vocabulary.
When teaching ELL students she also noticed the younger the ELL
student the easier it was for them to transition in their L2
understanding. The younger students are not afraid
to use the language and make mistakes, where the older the students are more
aware how others will react to what they say and how and how they say it. "New L2 knowledge is stored in the mind and has to be accessed and retrieved every time it is needed for use in comprehension or production" (Ortega, 2013, pg.84). Each ELL student has to process everything they read or write in English through
their L1 filter to make sense of their understanding and it takes time. In
comparison, the younger ELL students do not require such time to process new
words. Therefore, they adapt quicker acquiring L2 than their counterparts.
While reviewing my interview video I see how challenging it can be for English Language Learners who do not have the support system I am exposed to at my school. I see how important it is for ELL students to pre-learn academic terms and be able to connect how one word is similar to each other and how they can bring meaning to the new words. These students not only need to make connections to the word they have to be able to use it in real world situations.
Ortega, Lourdes. Second
Language Acquisition. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
