Entry 3: Interview with an ESL teacher
For this interview, I decided to step away from our traditional early childhood teachers and approached this interview with the question, "How do high school students learning a second language differ from early childhood second language learners?", and interviewed my best friend/ former colleague Ms. Angela Crowley. While our book focuses on second language acquisitions at an early age, I was curious to know about older students and their potential to learn a second language past their critical period which Ortega mentions is before the onset age of puberty (2013, p. 13). While Ms. Crowley has never served in a bilingual classroom before, she does spend more than 90 percent of her day surrounded by students whose primary language is not English and she has been able to serve them due to her training and ESL certification. Ms. Crowley addresses some topics that I found interesting like an older students motivation to learn and retain a second language has more to do with ...