Week 8 Reflection

The program in which I teach is a developmental bilingual program. We have a framework for language development which we follow very strictly to ensure that students are receiving the foundation of their L1 and progressing into their L2 at an appropriate pace. This framework breaks down the percentages by grade level of how much instructional time is spent in English and how much is spent in Spanish. Being that I teach first grade, it is 80% in Spanish and 20% in English. I teach their literacy all in Spanish. However, most of their Science and Social Studies (and some Math) is in English. So, naturally those lessons are focused around the content but with integrated language skills, which happen to be speaking and listening because according to our framework I do not develop their literacy in L2 at this level. I found Brown’s text related to teaching listening and speaking interesting for this reason. It is the focus of English language development in my classroom. His explanation of what makes listening and speaking difficult was especially helpful for me. It gives me a deeper understanding of why they may be struggling at times and what I can possibly do to alleviate this. For example, the redundancy issue. The situation he laid out where the two were speaking very clearly illustrated how many of us speak and it can make listening even more difficult is English is not your native language and you are trying to focus on getting the indented meaning of that conversation. One aspect of the reading I felt strongly about was promoting negotiated meaning by handing over a bit of control over the management of learning to the students. I try to do this with my students in terms of asking them what they want to learn about or if they were extremely engaged in a particular lesson I’ll ask them how can we extend this. I know this allows them to take ownership over their learning and they are more likely to be self-motivated in learning in these situations. If the interest is there they will try their hardest to understand, or at least that’s what I see in my classroom.