Interview With Bilingual Learners

For my third blog entry, I had the opportunity to interview Ms. Maria, a third-grade bilingual teacher with a little over ten years of experience, and the mother of my classmate. Ms. Maria just like her students has English as her second language but began her journey at the age of seventeen. This experience allows her to be more compassionate and understanding with her students’ situations as she went through the same thing but at a later age. I personally have never been enrolled in a bilingual class so this interview was insightful to see how different my experience was compared to her students. Ortega status that “Attitudes towards the formal learning context have been shown to exert a lasting and important influence on motivation. (Ortega, 2013, page 190)” so I thought it was quite interesting that when asked what learning approach was more beneficial Ms. Maria believed that both instruction and natural learning approaches are needed to acquire a language.
Allowing her students too often work in pairs or groups is a strategy she uses to create a safe and welcoming environment while still promoting a learning and increasing self-confidence. Looking back, I should have rephrased my question asking about bilingual students who mix their languages to clarify what I meant. Since her students are so young I would expect them to often intertwine their native language information to what they are currently learning such using a word in their first language since they don’t know the word in English, placing the adjective incorrectly, getting tenses wrong. Overall I found this interview to be informative of how a bilingual classroom functions, and hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to this information to my