Entry Three: Teacher Interview

I had the pleasure of interviewing my partner teacher, Mrs. Reyes. Mrs. Reyes is  Kindergarten bilingual teacher in the district of Alief ISD. She has always taught bilingual students so she has a lot of experience with them, fourteen years to be exact. Bilingual kids learn every content area in their native language, except mathematics. This has been where she has seen them struggle the most. The reason probably being that this is the one and only thing they must adapt differently. 

     One of the struggles she thinks ELL's struggle with is timing. Time for the little ones need more than just focus on exams. We as teachers do not always allow the practice to happen because of higher up demands. A way she thinks we can deal with this directly is acknowledging that we need to give them time to practice the language and have visuals to facilitate that practice. Visuals are really important because they need to have a point of reference in learning. According to Ortega, two key questions of interest are how the two (or more) languages are represented in the brain and how bilingual speakers switch and alternate between their two (or more) languages, depending on a range of communicative needs and desires (Ortega, 2013, pg. 6).  This is why being able to work with the social part of speaking is crucial as well. 

     

I really liked that she tied the social part of speaking to their development. I strongly feel that in primary grades such as Kindergarten this is a lot easier than the higher grades. I feel like she said that small group conversations are key to interaction to doing so. 

     The reasoning for her choice of bilingual program is because she likes to be flexible in how much of the other language she can blend. She did say she follows her guidelines nevertheless, she takes to her advantage when kids want to go further. In my opinion, this is so amazing of her. I feel like she does this because she is aware of the signs that her students are giving her and she listens. She thinks that their opinion and when they are ready she will move on but she still puts their reediness

 first because the bilingual program lends itself to that.

Entry Two: ELL Interview

Interviewing an ELL was interesting. I loved hearing her experiences and what she feels had either helped or hurt her language development as an ELL. The person I interviewed has been my next door neighbor for nearly twelve years now. We have been friends who have spoke in English to each other ever since I can remember, which is even more so why their was such an interesting experience for me!

Like she mentioned in the Video, Laura was taught English and Spanish at the same time, however her English as well as he Spanish is very fluent. According to Ortega,  there is clear evidence that accents are likely to develop when the L2 is first learned later in life (Ortega, 2013, 23). 

When Laura mentioned how hard Morphology was for her, I did relate to her as well. I myself was also an ELL. I was never in Bilingual but I do Phonology was harder for me. However, for me it was certainly learning Spanish. I know that we focus on English language learning and that is very important, but I do feel as though learning any two languages can be tricky and a challenge that is easily overlooked since it i not English, when it should not be this way because the struggle and difficulties are still there.

I really have always believed that as educators we must do our part to understand what children need not where we think they should be according to age or ability. For instance, with Laura her teachers never took the time to talk about her pronunciation or her, they wanted her to seem as if she knew it sou they could do their job and move on. I like being an ELL because I hope and feel like I will want my kids to actually feel like they are hitting their mark in everything they possibly should be to truly understand a language.


Ortega, L. (2014). Understanding second language acquisition. Routledge.

Entry One: Introduction

Hi there! My name is Marina Velazquez. I am so excited to take this course along with you all! One last semester, go coogs!