ESL Teacher Reflection #4

As I was sitting in class today during our discussions on listening strategies and activities for ELL students, I couldn’t help but detect several parallels between listening strategies and activities for foreign language learners, and listening strategies for very young native English speaker learners.

            Right now, I am working in a kindergarten classroom where most of the students have an extremely low reading and writing ability.  Every time I am in the classroom, they are always doing literacy centers where they practice their letter recognition, word recognition, writing and spelling.  Very few students can recognize all the letters of the alphabet, and even fewer can recall their sounds.  My teacher uses a lot of songs in her lessons to give the students more practice with letter and sound recognition, and this is a similar technique used for ELL students.  Additionally, the students partake in several activities dealing with rhyming words so they can connect their knowledge about letters they already know, to letters they don’t know and are learning about.  I’ve noticed that many of the activities my kindergarten students do regarding literacy involve bottom-up processes that deal with sounds, letters and words.  I’ve also realized that many of the bottom-up strategies for ELL students are extremely similar to the ones for native English speaker students, but that the top-down strategies are where I see some differences.  Native English speaking students do not have to use as many top-down processes as ELL students do, and they do so in different ways.  Even reflecting on my own English learning and second language learning I realized that I have used several bottom-up and top-down strategies for both languages, and they are useful in different situations for the different languages.  I think learning more about these listening strategies will also help me become a better Spanish learner and speaker by being aware of what to do in a listening situation to comprehend everything.

            On a different note, I liked watching the language lesson videos for the SIOP essay because I felt like I was able to understand the features better when looking at one, complete lesson rather than different parts of different lessons.  When I could see the full, comprehensive lesson, I was able to identify several SIOP features and had a better grasp on how those features integrate into and enhance the language lesson.  It also made me more comfortable with the concept of teaching a foreign language or an ESL in the future, whereas beforehand, I was more skeptical of my abilities to be able to do so effectively.