On the Inside: Spanish Immersion in GIF Form

When I walked into the church, I looked around at the stained glass and unfamiliar surroundings. My Catholic church does not look as traditional as this church, but this is a beautiful place! It's full of life and, once Mass began, it was quite full of people. Truth be told, every pew was full...except for ours. I guess they could tell we were new.

[caption id="attachment_125" align="aligncenter" width="286"] Pretty little trees, happy little clouds.[/caption]

I have a lot of experience in classrooms learning Spanish, but there are many, many words I do NOT know. This was made clear as soon as I opened the Order of the Mass.

My husband and I brought our Magnificat, so we had the readings with us. I tried to read along in English as I listened to them in Spanish, to try to reinforce my understanding. When the homily came around, the priest spoke quickly at first, but I soon realized he was repeating a lot. He started to make his point and spoke very slowly, word-by-word. As he did this, I started to understand his whole "point" of the homily.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] *woman[/caption]

Then he sped up.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] meow?[/caption]

ELL Technology Resources

Teaching Resource

This is a blog from an ESL teacher that offers several activities that he has tested in the classroom. Most of his suggestions are for authentic ESL activities that can be adapted for many ages, developmental levels, and language proficiency levels.

Authentic:

This is a podcast that a Spanish woman and her English boyfriend made several years ago to help people who are learning to speak the Spanish language. They introduce the lesson in English, speaking slowly, and sharing with the listener some vocabulary words they will need to know. After that, they launch into a Spanish conversation, using the vocab words they just introduced. This could work in reverse for Spanish-speaking students learning English.

This website connects students of all languages to strike up a pen pal relationship with a student from any other country. I thought this could be a way for students who are learning English to pair up with students who are native English speakers to communicate with someone in the ELL student’s L1. It might also be good to pick a pen pal who speaks an entirely different language for these students to converse with.

Dia-Logging

In reflection on David Schwarzer's "Student and Teacher Strategies for Communicating through Dialogue Journals in Hebrew: A Teacher Research Project."

It was interesting to read in the introduction that the objective of this paper was not to prove effectiveness of dialogue journals on acquisition of a foreign language. Instead, the research article looked into the ways in which students and teachers were using dialogue journals to supplement other language learning activities. The practice seemed to help produce a relationship between the student and the teacher, which Schwarzer mentioned. One example of him making the students more comfortable with the written Hebrew language was to use "block letters" until the students became comfortable enough to choose to use script writing in the journals. He let them lead, but also somehow managed to challenge them enough that they expected this higher level of themselves. The students used codeswitching and translation as a way to communicate and to help themselves understand.

La Misa Española

My husband and I immersed ourselves in the Hispanic culture of Richmond this weekend as we went to Spanish Mass. Originally we planned to go to Vietnamese Mass in another city, which would have been a severe language difference, but it didn't work out.

[caption id="attachment_110" align="alignright" width="198"] Me when I realized I wasn't drowning in language! [Image courtesy of FreeDigitalImages.net][/caption]My academic background includes about six years of Spanish language classes and a little experience practicing my Spanish language acquisition among friends in the United States. This was an entirely different level of immersion as there were no breaks, no opportunities for others to recast for me, and no English translations or scaffolding.

Despite the high percentage of vocabulary words I was unfamiliar with during the Mass, to my pure delight I understood the majority of what was going on. Yay! All of those years of school and studying paid off today!

First of all, I am a devout Catholic and am very familiar with the procedures of the Mass, which is the same wherever one goes and in every language (big perk, aside from the many others). Also, I brought the readings (which are prescribed ahead of time and universal for today around the world in the Catholic Church) with me so I could consult them. This helped me become familiar enough with the language and my surroundings to lower my affective filter.

Additionally, I sang along with the help of the worship songbook without worrying about mispronouncing the words because I was with my husband (someone who doesn't, of course, judge me for mispronunciations...or lack of singing talent).

The church was packed and the people who sat around us were quite welcoming during a part of the Mass in which everyone turns to their neighbor to offer the peace of Christ. I love this brother/sisterhood!

As a qualitatively minded person, my first reaction was to reflect first on the cultural aspects of attending Mass in a language with which I have only novice familiarity. However, in reflecting on my knowledge of SLA and the most effective way to acquire a second language, I cannot wait to go back!

Attending Mass, striking up more conversations with those around me, and comparing the Spanish and English translations as I use them during an event with which I have so much familiarity would be a Krashen-approved language acquisition activity. My husband and I have spoken about making this a regular challenge for the sake of our own language acquisition and community involvement.

Languages and Children: Chapter 10

This chapter is written for people like me! I am a qualitatively minded person, always trying to draw connections between the little nuggets of knowledge I know and encounter. Throughout the time in this class, I have brainstormed some content areas that would be best used for certain activities for effective SLA instruction. I want to make sure to create a respectful culture in my classroom that acknowledges the cultures of all students (and teachers) in the room, while providing an effective forum for teaching language and this chapter shows the need for that. Mathematics and science, of course, are listed among those content areas that most need language-related instruction. It was interesting to dive into the Connections Standards that stated that there are some aspects that students can only fully understand through the foreign language and its cultures.

Languages and Children: Chapter 5

Here in the first page, one of my questions that I asked in class during the KWL is answered determinedly. In the past, introducing the written word to second language learners was seen as a bad practice and a way to confuse the young mind. Now, methods scholars suggest that we should introduce the written word as soon as possible. Like teaching literacy to anyone, there are a few necessities: fostering help with missing schemas, introducing reading and writing as tools for communication (not just filling out a worksheet), building a word wall, teaching the basics of directionality and the physical processes of reading a book, surrounding the students with meaningful written words, and peer teaching (or shared reading). This chapter provides a few great starter activities for the early language learning child.

Making it Happen: Chapter 13

The first thing that was rolling through my mind as I read this chapter on "Ways to Promote Literacy Development" was the motivation factor for ELL students. As Richard-Amato describes, there are a myriad of factors involved with the literary progress of each child and the motivation for ELL students can be affected by many. Beginning the process with the students' prior knowledge is imperative, as she describes, because you get them on the right foot. From my limited classroom experience, I can agree with Richard-Amato about the benefits of starting with reading aloud literature to help students make the connection between phonemes, letters, words, writing, and reading. It seems like a fluid and obvious connection to us, but it is not so for an inexperienced child. This chapter offers many strategies for teachers that I will soon revisit.

Languages and Children: Chapter 4

The entire field of education heralds the positive impact that collaborative/cooperative learning can have on the success of many students. As this chapter discusses, peer interaction learning can help students make an emotional connection to the content, can help students discover the objective on their own, and it can help them develop social and language skills. This is especially important for students learning English because they have a lot of meaningful input experience and are prompted to producing meaning-making output (two essential parts of the SLA equation). One of my favorite activity examples was the "Finding differences: one picture" activity because it was a simple way to have students practice comparing two things. This is a skill they will need for the rest of their academic careers, on a deeper level.

Making it Happen: Chapter 9

I victoriously punched the air when I started reading this chapter. This chapter is rich with ideas for interactive strategies and their foundation in studying "the natural approach." The natural approach plots the progression of students through three stages: comprehension, early speech production, and speech emergence. The comprehension stage is also known as the silent stage, when students absorb what they are acquiring of the language through listening. Next they begin to make meaning through output (or attempt to do so). And finally, they become more proficient with their speech, supplemented by more input. The chapter provides several activities to support students at all stages.

Languages and Children: Chapter 6

Effective lesson planning has been one of the most challenging and empowering teacher knowledge I have acquired this year. As I read this chapter, C&D kept confirming what I've learned in these last few months: good instruction planning advice is found with the ESL and Exceptional Learning professionals. ESL and Exceptional Learning teachers and researchers have spent the last several decades learning so much about the brain and how it works best (this chapter, obviously, focuses on the advantages of planning units/weeks/days around a central theme or big picture) using the most up-to-date technology and research practices. While other factions of the education world have done a great job of completing their research and have come to the same conclusions (no more lines of desks in a classroom, no more memorizing arbitrary lists of words, etc), the ESL and Exceptional Learning research gives the best practice advice available.