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Rebecca Leedham

ELL/ESL Student Interview

I interviewed my friend from home named Belen Almanza. She is 21 years old and was

born in the United States. Both of her parents are from Mazatlan, Mexico and moved to the

United States when some of her extended family offered work opportunities for them here.

Although her first language was Spanish and that is what she spoke primarily at home, she had

been slowly learning English from birth as well and carried the good amount of what she

already knew with her into school. The conducted interview took place over the phone, since

she now lives in Texas, at 7:00pm on Tuesday, September 26th. I have known Belen, or Bell as

we call her, since I was 14. I moved from California to Washington and she was one of the first

people that I had met through my youth group. Throughout high school and into college, she

has always been one of my best friends. I chose her for this interview because I knew of her

background as an English Language Learner as she went through school. Although I knew some

details about her experience, I was excited to learn more and to see how her experience has

affected her and brought her to be who she is today.

From this interview and my interviewee, I learned overall that every English Language

Learner is so different and they all have different experiences. Wright talks about this in the

book Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners when he writes that you cannot

really encompass all ELLs into one category (Wright 8). My interviewee had an experience that

seems similar to some others that I have heard. However, her experience is still so unique as

she even played a large part in her parents becoming fluent in English. Bell’s parents were born
in Mexico and moved to the United States before she was born because her extended family

had work opportunities for them. She was born in 1996 in Bremerton, Washington. When I

asked Bell what language she preferred to speak and why, she seemed to like speaking both of

them. However, she decided that she was slightly more comfortable speaking Spanish because

it is always what was spoken around her home. Bell also said that she only really prefers

speaking Spanish if there are many other Spanish speakers around her. If not, she sometimes

feels a little bit less comfortable because not everyone around her knows what she is saying.

Bell said that her family supports her speaking both languages but they typically speak in

Spanish more often since it is what they have always spoke together. Throughout school, Bell

said that she had a lot of different resources. She said that the specialist was a huge help and

she became fluent because of all of the help and resources in her school. She spent a good

amount of time with the specialist and that was the biggest key to her success in learning

English at the beginning. It didn’t take her very long to learn English with all of the resources

that she had provided.

I had asked bell if she ever got confused with the two languages that she speaks and she

said it isn’t usually a problem for her. Although Bell does find herself code switching in some

cases when the person she is speaking to also speaks both languages, but she always uses the

language that she is intending to. Bell was motivated to learn English because it is such a largely

used language in the United States and in the school system it is very necessary to know the

language. Since Bell was so young, she simply learned what was taught to her. Bell’s parents

spoke a little bit of English but learned a lot from Bell herself. Bell’s schooling ultimately taught

her family English vocabulary as well as Bell herself. Her parents also learned English through
different sources such as work and outside tutors. My final question to Bell was about the

easiest and hardest parts about learning a new language. She thought about this for a while and

then expressed the difficulty that she found in spelling. On the contrary, there were many

similarities in vocabulary words that helped to make learning English easier for her. When it

came down to having to write the words out and correctly spell them, it seemed to be more

confusing since similar words were often spelled differently in English. Wright says that spelling

is something that is getting more and more difficult over the years as the English vocabulary

expands and gets more complicated (36). For someone who is learning English and is trying to

learn how to spell some of these complex words, this could be more difficult. Throughout my

interview, my interviewee pushed the perseverance that her family had. They were all

dedicated to their life in the United States and Bell’s family supported herself and each other

through everything that they did. They were all learning more and more about the United

States every day together and she expressed the positivity that their family had in their

household.

I believe that teaching a new language to someone is something that is an amazing

experience. Like stated before, every person that is learning a new language has a different

background from the next person. Not only does a teacher get to be a part of bringing a new

way of communication and understanding to an individual but they also get to learn about each

individual’s background as they work with them. Wright states, “…knowing a language means

being able to use it to communicate effectively with other speakers of the language” (36). To

teach a language, you have to go beyond this and communicate in ways that are more than just

the language being taught in order to effectively teach the language.


I plan to teach my ELL students with a very open mind. It is important to know their

background so you can see what kind of learner they may be and understand their mistakes.

When someone learns English as their first language, they do not typically learn all of the

specific patterns and rules. However, a student learning English as an addition language would

need to understand what they are learning more in depth. Wright talks about what he thinks

teachers need to know about language in general and he expresses the importance of

phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicon, and spelling (31-36). Although I

think some of these will have more importance and require more focus than others when

learning English as a new language, I plan to incorporate all of these into my teaching.
Resources

Belen Almanza

Wright, W. E. (2015). Foundations for teaching English language learners: Research, theory,
and practice (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Caslon.
Interview Questions:

1) What is language?
Language is the way we verbally communicate with one another.
2) What components form a language?
Written and spoken words form a language
3) What is teaching a language and how would you teach it?
Teaching a language is how people learn how to speak it. I would speak it around
someone often and compare it to their current language in order to teach them.
4) What does it mean to know and use a language?
To know a language is to understand it and to use it is to use it as a form of
communication.
5) What language do you prefer to communicate in? Why?
Prefers to communicate in Spanish because she has always just felt more comfortable
speaking in the language that was always spoken around her home. However, Spanish is
only preferred if most people around speak Spanish as well or else she feels more
comfortable speaking in English.
6) Does your family like it when you speak your L1 or L2? Why?
Her family prefers Spanish if they had to make the choice and they are much more fluent
in Spanish. However, English is supported thoroughly in the home and they try to speak
it when they can. She has taught her parents a large portion of their English that they
know today.
7) What resources were you provided that helped make the language learning process
easier?
She was put into a school district that provided excellent resources. She would spend
about an hour a day with a specialist at first until she needed less and less help. Her
teachers were always accommodating and made sure she understood everything that was
going on.
8) How long did it take you to learn English?
Since it was always around her, it did not take her that long. After a couple of years in
school she was very fluent and clear in the language. This including reading and writing.
9) Do you ever get confused speaking with two languages? Why or why not?
Sometimes She will code switch when I am around other people that know both of the
languages but she always uses the language that she is intending to use. She does not
typically get confused with the two languages.
10) What motivated you to learn English? Why?
She doesn’t want to say that she was forced to learn English but living in the US, you
basically need to know it to communicate. In the school systems, it is very necessary to
know the language.
11) Do your parents speak English? If so, where did they learn it from?
Her parents speak English from their jobs and outside sources of learning it. Though they
are now fluent, they had learned a lot such as vocab from Bell as she was bringing her
English home from school.
12) What was the easiest and hardest part about learning a new language? Why?
Spanish and English have many similarities and the alphabet is very similar. These
similarities made learning over vocab and words easier than other things such as sentence
structure. The hardest part was spelling.
13) Did you enter the American Education system knowing English at all?
She knew a few pieces of English entering the system but the school is what taught her
most of what she knows.
14) Is one language easier for you to speak than another?
Not anymore, she said that Spanish was for a long time but now it is equal.
15) Did learning English during school make it harder to learn the other concepts?
Since she was so young when she was learning English in the school system, it did not
make it much harder for her to learn what she was supposed to. It was typically easier
concepts and reading/writing helped her work on her English anyway.

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