Marissa Gonzalez: Second Language Methodology Introduction Vlog #1

Hello, my name is Marissa Gonzalez and I am a senior here at the University of Houston.  I am currently student teaching in Cy-fair ISD to a class of kindergarteners.  I love teaching to they younger students and hope to be able to teach this age when I am teaching my own class next year. There is only one esl student in my class this year and to help him my mentor teacher puts up a lot of visuals around the room as well as uses sign language and hand motions to help him better understand what is happening in the class and what we are learning. 

My own experience with a foreign language began when I was first born. My ancestors are from Mexico so I am a Mexican American, born in the US. Although my mom, dad, aunts and uncles and grandparents all speak Spanish, my cousins and I do not.  That’s odd to me because my cousins and I were raised in the rio grand valley where the population is mostly Hispanic. Our grandparents who only spoke Spanish also babysat us until we were in late elementary, but we still didn’t pick it up. I really wish I could have learned to speak Spanish fluently because then I would be able to speak with my grandparents and other Spanish speakers.  I wouldn’t say I was a complete loss however.  Since Spanish speakers did babysit me I can say that I did pick a couple useful skills.  I would say that I can understand a good amount of Spanish and can even write and read it at an okay level. Speaking it, however, is a totally different thing to me and virtually impossible so I would consider myself far from fluent.

Since I didn’t learn Spanish naturally while growing up I decided to enroll in Spanish in high school. I had three Spanish teachers in high school because I took 3 Spanish courses and they got harder each time.  My first teacher was from Spain and tried to teach us the proper grammar to use.  Since that class was Spanish 1 and just the basics, my teacher tried to teach us to the best of his abilities so we would have a good foundation going forward.  I remember he would use a lot of visuals to build our vocabulary.  I pretty mush knew the basics of Spanish from growing up so I would say the thing that I gained the most in this course was vocabulary. Spanish 2 was a little more difficult because it was building upon the knowledge of Spanish 1. My teacher from Spanish 2 wasn’t the best. She seemed to be more focused on building friendships with students rather than teaching them.  I remember wasting time in class for a good 15 mins just talking to the teacher or the teacher talking to the whole class about the weekend. The class time was only 50 mins so we didn’t get much done most of the time.  I cant say I really learned too much in Spanish 2 but the one thing I did learn about that stuck was the Spanish culture in general. We studied different festivals and traditions and those are the things I do remember because we would have our own little celebrations in class.  I think Spanish 3 would be my best year learning Spanish however. That year I had an excellent teacher who would help her students all the time.  She would use songs, visuals, and movies to teach us vocabulary, grammar, and so we could relate it to our lives. This seemed to work for me because by the end of the semester I was able to write paragraphs in Spanish about almost anything I wanted to write about.  The only thing I couldn’t do was speak Spanish, but that might have been my own confidence’s fault.

After high school I realized that I still could learn more and so I decided to download an app called Duolingo so I could keep practicing my Spanish.  I liked the app because it had me actually speaking into the phones microphone to practice my accent and speech.  Of course life kicked in and I haven’t been able to practice too much lately but I still have it downloaded on my phone. 

Since high school I haven’t had too much exposure to Spanish where I have been able to practice my Spanish speaking skills.  I would say the only people I am exposed to that speak Spanish are my parents and grandparents, but my parents speak English all the time at home and in public and my grandparents live 6 hours away and when I do see them I usually just listen instead of speak.  If I do get exposed to other people that speak Spanish I usually get too nervous and tell them I don’t speak Spanish because I don’t know if I would be able to actually talk to them coherently.

As a future teacher I would say that I think foreign languages are best learned by the use of a lot of visuals.  I have talked to my own friends that grew up speaking another language other than English and the thing that they say helped them a lot was just being surrounded by the language in all areas of their lives.  They said that watching English TV shows, listening to English music, and being around the English language at school helped them a lot because they were able to pick it up through multiple medias. I would try to do the same for my students who were trying to learn English as well.  I would try to use a mix of visuals, music, videos, and of course myself to get them familiar with English grammar and vocabulary. It is important to be a good teacher to all students no matter their first language, but especially if those students are still trying to learn English because they will have a harder time in classes just due to the language barrier.  I hope to be a good teacher to my students and I hope to learn a lot about how to teach ELL students during this semester’s course.