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Entry 4: Reflection

This course has enlightened me on how ESL students learn English and other content areas. Before this course, I did not know how many factors affected the language learning process. I thought learning a language was mostly rote memorization. This course taught me that teachers need to take into consideration internal and external factors of each student as they are learning language. Additionally, the teacher needs to take into consideration macro level ideas, such as crosslinguistic influences and foreign language aptitudes. At first, I did not think this class would help me as much when I become a teacher because I have no intentions on becoming an ESL or bilingual teacher, however, my views on this have changed. Since I have begun student teaching I have learned that this content should be taken into consideration by all content teachers because a student may be in an inclusive classroom despite learning English as a second language. As a future teacher, I  bring the learni...
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Entry 3: Interview with an English Second Language Teacher

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             For my interview, I chose to interview a teacher that is on my Student Teaching campus. While I have not had a chance to work closely with Mrs. Vazquez before conducting this interview, Mrs. Vazquez also allowed me to observe her classroom. It was an interesting experience because I could see that her classroom was similar to my own, as it had group settings for the students to increase their collaboration, but it had much more visuals, such as anchor charts, around the classroom.             As for Mrs. Vazquez’s interview, one major interest of mine that I also saw within her classroom was her “Wall of Mistakes”. Mrs. Vazquez chooses to embrace mistakes in her classroom because she mentioned that this instills a growth mindset within her students. When they are afraid to fail, they also become afraid to succeed. Ortega also mentions this when he talks ab...
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Entry 2: Interview with a Second Language Learner

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I chose to interview my friend from Montreal, Emile. While it may seem strange to choose someone who is not from the United States, I wanted to choose to interview someone from an area where I may possibly teach in the future. More than that, since I have begun to learn about Montreal, I have become interested with their interesting take on second language acquisition education. Some of the schools in Montreal have students learn and practice French at first, and then as they reach higher grades, English is included into class at an exponential rate. By the end of a student's high school career, they are fluent in English.  This approach allows students to constantly practice English in a formal setting, similar to Emile being an instructed learner (Ortega, 2013, pg. 6). However, Emile was lucky enough to be able to practice English at home as well, since his family speaks English, which allowed him to also be considered a naturalistic learner (Ortega, 2013, pg. 6)....
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Entry 1: Course Introduction

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Chelsea Sanchez's Blog Welcome to the first entry of my blog. My name is Chelsea Sanchez and I am currently a senior at the University of Houston. I am majoring in Teaching & Learning and minoring in Leadership Studies. As an aspiring educator, I am hoping to create a classroom culture where not only is every child accepted despite their differences, but they are embraced for being unique. I will promote diversity in the classroom by learning about different cultures throughout the year, especially pertaining to students in the classroom.In particular, I am looking to focus mainly on teaching 4th-5th grade because I believe this is when students begin to notice that they are different from their peers. Growing up in a diverse household, I never knew exactly where I fell along the lines of being American or being Hispanic. While my family and I celebrated nearly all American traditions, we also celebrated many Hispanic traditions, however, it was hard for me to underst...
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