ESL Reflection #3 - Sarah Miller

Last week, I had an interesting interaction while volunteering at an elementary school. I go into a kindergarten class at Forest View Elementary School once a week for three to four hours. The population of this school is moderately diverse, but does not have very many linguistically diverse students. I know there are some that speak Spanish to some extent (I'm not exactly sure how much) at home, but all students can speak and interact in English, at least in the classroom I work in.

I didn't really think about home languages of these students until I was working with a student on writing his name and he mentioned something about his mom being able to speak Spanish and how he knows a few things too. Since I'm minoring in Spanish, I thought it would be interesting to tell him (or even demonstrate) that I could speak a little Spanish too. When I did, he seemed very surprised that I could speak Spanish, and kept saying things like "I didn't know you could do that!"  It wasn't a huge deal, but it did make me see how some kids appreciate hearing a language spoken at home in the school environment.

Later on that same day, another student asked me if I could say something in Spanish (it's possible the previously mentioned student had told them I could). There was a group of around 4 students with me at the time. It was a simple word, and so I easily told them what it was. I don't know if the students have a special language class or not, but they were all suddenly intrigued and interested by this foreign language's presence. They asked if I knew a couple other words, which I did and relayed to them as well. It seemed to be something that didn't happen that often - to have an authority figure speaking different language, but they all seemed to love it.

This led me to think about how enthusiastic kids would likely be for a program set up in the form of something like the two-way immersion model, where two languages are focused on and used for learning purposes. If they can get so excited about just a couple words that I said, think how much they would love to learn their own words in a different language. I think the hesitation in creating two-way immersion programs comes from the adult perspectives, not the children's. If we were to take on their point of view, we could see that learning another language is not only stretching for the mind, but also fun and exciting for young children. If they start early, then this state of mind could be kept fresh throughout their education and support bilingualism, which I think is a very beneficial thing to have.