Reflective Blog 2

 ESL: My learning and Teaching experiences  

June 2, 2023

Here is my experience learning English as a second language. I went to a French Elementary school and high school. Until the age of 13-14, I was not exposed to the English language or barely. I sometimes heard it on the radio, I heard it when traveling, and at school maybe once or twice a week during the ESL classes. On top of that, I was quite reserved as a child and I was too shy to practice the language out loud. I had no willingness to communicate (WTC), and I was very anxious and insecure about making mistakes when practicing(Lightbown & Spada). I do not think my teachers were bad, I just think my identity and motivation blocked me from learning. The only motivation I had was to pass my classes. I was giving minimal effort with the purpose of attaining immediate goals. I had the integrative motivation to simply pass the class(Gardner & Lambert, 1972). However, it's been shown that identities are dynamic(Toohey, 2018). As I got older, I became much less introverted and reserved and as willing to try even if I made mistakes. I also made some friends that speak English at home and with each other. At that point, my motivation changed into instrumental and integrative motivation, I started to want to learn English to communicate with them, and for myself(Gardner & Lambert, 1972). I didn’t even notice I was learning and getting better because I was just hanging out with my friends and having fun instead of focusing on learning. 

A good experience I had was when teaching at the House of Friendship. This experience taught me the importance of building rapport with your students and showing them that the classroom is a safe environment that accepts and uses mistakes as tools to learn. I had a student who struggled a lot at the beginning of the course. She was very shy and was anxious to participate. I showed her that I understood why she was nervous and that mistakes weren’t a bad thing. I showed her by using the students that were not shy at all. Using them as examples even if they were making mistakes. It was also a little difficult because I taught her English as a second language and her first language was Ukrainian. I do not know Ukrainian at all so all the communicating was in English with the minimum knowledge she had of it. She became more and more comfortable in the classroom and started to speak to me and then her peers. By the end of the course, she was one of my best students, her pronunciation was better than most of her peers and she made little mistakes. Her attitude and aptitude changed once she realized that the class was a safe and supportive environment and that my only purpose was to help her achieve success. 

 

Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2021). How languages are learned (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.