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Click here to see Video Blog 3 For my interview, I met with my friend Kelli. She has been teaching for about six years and she is an ELL teacher. She currently has both ESL and ELL students in her class and that has been both challenging and rewarding for her. One of the questions that I asked Kelli, was what her biggest struggle is as a teacher who teaches ELL students. She explained to me that it is hard to distinguish whether or not they are having a hard time reading because of their language or if they also have something else going on. I could understand how this could be challenging because you have students who are below level and then you have students who are ELLs and also might be struggling academically. After hearing this, I did a lot of thinking about what I would do in a situation like that as a teacher. I referred to chapter six in the textbook, where Wright mentions that "one of the easiest ways to assess ELLs is by observing them (Wright, p. 139, 2015). By g...

Hey, everyone ! Click HERE for my Blog Entry #2 For my interview, I met up with Joe who I met through a mutual friend. Joe was born in Austin, Texas into a Spanish speaking family. As a matter of fact, his grandparents were the ones that raised him, and to this day, they do not speak very much English. Joe started Kindergarten at a new school and it was the first year his school had Kindergarten classes. Surprisingly, Joe was not the only one who spoke Spanish. He explained to me that his class full of about 30-40 children and almost half of them spoke Spanish. His teacher had a teachers aide who helped the Spanish speaking students transition to English, and Joe still remembers her to this day. To start of my interview, I asked Joe what the process was transitioning from Spanish to English. He said that it was hard and overwhelming to connect English words to things that he already knew in Spanish. This made me think about the Input Processing Model developed by VanPatten. This m...

Welcome, everyone! I'm Savannah Block and I am a senior at the University of Houston. I look forward to graduating in May with a Bachelor's in Human Development and Family Studies and an EC-6 Generalist certification. I am excited to learn many new things throughout this course! Entry 1- Introduction