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...