Chapter 1 English Language Learner gives a description on who is considered as English Learner, how to welcome them to English Classroom and how to teach them using English language. And here I found that cultural understanding plays important role.
On other part, the book also suggest that teacher can allow student of non-native english to use their own language at the first few meeting. But the question is ‘can teacher understand the student’s language?’. It could be very difficult if there were many children with many different languages.
On the last part, the author gives description on the policy on using billingual language to accommodate student need as well as to make their learning abilities on content knowledge a little bit easier. I think this billingual program is good to those who have little ability of English, or new comer to the United States. However, this program is not for those who can understand and speak english well, even though their native language is not English.
In reflection to my own experience, native-english teacher who can speak my language--Indonesia—is a lot easier to understand and to follow instruction than those who can not speak my language. I have two teachers. Both come from the U.S. One teacher can speak my language while the other can not. I found out that I can easily follow and understand the first teacher. When I do not understand I can ask him to say in my language. This help me very much.
The other teacher can not speak or understand my language. I found that it is difficult to follow him. I think this is not only affected by his lack of understanding of my language but also by his lack of understanding the way we speak, the way we express my mind into word. So cultural and sosiolinguistic understanding does play important role.
Note: this chapter is not too usefull for me, because I am not the native English speaker but I will teach English in Indonesia, whose English is foreign Language.
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4 comments:
I understand why you would find the first chapter to be less relevant than the second chapter. However, our understanding of Second Language Acquisition is based on First Language Acquisition, hence Chapter 1.
I'm also curious about whether the first teacher who could speak Bahasa Indonesia used that language much in the classroom. As a teacher, I suspect that the more target language (English) is used in the classroom, the more opportunity there is for students to work in that language.
Regarding your last point, I think that when we talk about whether teacher should use Ss' first langugage or not, we should know that there are certain situations where the teacher should talk to the students' in Ss' L1. Some of those instaces are serious issues that the students need very clear information on, or students do not understand an instruction for homeworks. It says in the book "How Languages are learned" that there should be coopration in communication. for example the native speaker or lets say the teacher should simpify his language to meke to easier for the listener to understand him.
I understand that this chapter might not be very useful for you, as you are not a native speaker. But you could use it to compare the way people acquire their first language. Are the mistakes children make while learning their first language the same for English and Indonesian? This comparison might be useful for you if you decide to teach English to children of age 2-3.
I read your example of the two teachers one that can speak indonesian and one that can't. it reminded me of my teachers in Germany and they would not clarify in English I am not aware if they could have if they wanted to. however my friend spoke german very well and was able to explain in english and i do not think that it helped me out. i think i should have tried to converse more in german to understand it. I think that would have been more beneficial for me. Unlike you where the native language helped you understand better.
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