Second Life

Have you ever felt like your life would be totally different if you didn’t make a certain decision? When I was only two years old my parents made the decision to move to California. They believed my sister and I would have better opportunities here. Knowing how difficult it would be driving all that way since we did not have the money for plane tickets, they did it anyway. Growing up in a Hispanic home, I was obviously used to hearing and speaking Spanish. When it came to going to school, I…

While there would be an infinite number of ways to raise bilingual children, the two that stand out to me are One Parent One Language and Minority Language at Home. The one covered here will be Minority Language at Home. The minority language is the language that is not spoken in the community. For example, if a family lives in the United States and one of them is from Mexico, the minority language would be Spanish because English is spoken in the community. Therefore, one of the parenting…

This week’s webcast with Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan was very informative. I learned that when a language is alphabetic, the consonant sounds transfer very well from language to language. Therefore, a teacher can be aware of the difficulties and problems regarding that area even if the child is speaking their native language. However, vowels, especially short vowel sounds, are very difficult for English Language Learners. Dr. Hagan then went into some detail about how to help with the vowel sounds,…

One of the most impactful experiences of my education has been being a part of a dual language program. I was enrolled as an English only speaker, the second year the program was offered. Starting in Kindergarten, half my day was taught in English, half in Spanish. We were partnered up with “bilingual buddies” which switched every few weeks. I stayed in the dual program all the way to 8th grade, then at high school, where dual wasn’t offered, I enrolled in Spanish courses to continue my…

Before we started writing, I told Triven we would be writing for ten minutes and that he could write a narrative or true story on any of the topics that we listed the day before. It took him ten minutes to write two sentences, so I gave him some more time. We spent a total of fourteen minutes writing, I had to prompt him to keep writing about 3-4 times. Triven is in 3rd grade and he exhibited very little enthusiasm when reading his piece back to me. He mumbled and didn’t seem very confident with…

Taking the English standardized tests tends university students to pay more attention to English. Due to the fact that the purpose of the English standardized tests is an evaluation of the students' English language proficiency, consequently, the students certainly are enthusiastic to learn English more than usual for passing these English standardized tests. As Orie (2008) said that she took the practice exam of TOEIC and she collected more than 500 points then she wanted to improve her scores…

communicating effectively in the workplace, the home, the grocery store, church, and various other public spaces…” There was clearly no common sense used in making this decision. If you know that this is going to affect your graduates drastically in life then why are you cutting using the past tense. Along with not being able to communicate effectively in public places, this also affects them when applying for colleges. Let’s think about it. Let’s pretend that you're writing your essay to apply…

In a globalized world, people are gradually aware of the benefits of mastering of new tongue, such as more knowledge, more opportunities in massive life and even more chances to develop themselves. Being a bilingual can help people broaden their mind by approaching a huge fund of knowledge from all over the world through foreign documents, books and news in a proactive way with no language obstacle. As a result, this might lead people seeing the world from a different point of view.…

Hearing is considered one of the first of the five senses to develop in a fetus. The human ear begins developing early on, at 5 weeks into the pregnancy, starting with the inner ear. At week 6, the canals of the inner ear will form, then at week 8, the shell shaped parts of the ears will form, and at week 11, the outer ear will already appear, low set on the baby’s head, until they will settle in their final position at week 16. At 18 weeks, the ears start to stick out at the sides of the…

What role does bilingual education policy have in the educational opportunity structure for English language learners (ELLs)? The study of X Public School District Bilingual program exposed all the deficiencies found in Bilingual education. The study was conducted in a district where the majority of ELLs were Hispanics who performed below the 50th percentile in the NJASK3 and NJASK4 Language Arts Literacy and Mathematics as well as below the 20th percentile in the GEPA and HSPA Language Arts…