English Experience Reflection Paper

Spanish has been crucial to me for my whole life because it shows that I’m bilingual. Not only do I use it in school, but also at home with my family. For the most part, this language has been with me since I was a little girl. I began to speak Spanish at age two and learned how to write it at age four. My parents helped me practice Spanish by speaking it. They also told me read Spanish books out loud, so I could speak it fluently. Luckily I went to Mexico when I was seven, but I only went that one time, so I haven't been able to practice with my whole family. In addition, I’ve had Spanish classes since kindergarten and now as a junior I continue to learn new things. As a teenager, I seem to use it more in my daily life, because my parents only speak Spanish which is how I’ve gained experience. For example, when my parents took me to Mexico at age seven, I learned to speak with all my family.

English class has never been my strong suite. I always had to work twice as hard in English then I did in any other class. Writing paper always had me stressed and overwhelmed, I felt discouraged in my work. l never seemed to be able to get to the level I wanted to. I would try my hardest and paid attention in class, but when it came to writing the paper none of that seemed to help. I think that my experience in English Composition 1 has helped gain and grow in some areas, but I don’t think that it highlights a well-written college essay. Some elements that I worked to improving was introduction paragraphs, tone, style, and thesis statements.

English Composition I has developed my style of writing and my skills analyzing and researching topics to write a piece about a topic. Throughout the course, I got better at analyzing articles and pieces to get the meaning of the topic. With that improved skill I was more able to use the information given from the text and install it into my essays, with proper citation if needed. Before taking the English Composition course, I was not one to organize my essays in an ordeal order to clearly state the point of the work. Now with taking the course, I have learned to organize my essays, examine research for a topic, and develop an essay with proper mechanics, and revising skills. In writing my personal, review, analytical, and cultural

I now speak English and Spanish because I managed to keep my first language. I had bilingual classes up to fifth grade. Because my parents did not speak a word of English, I had to translate for them regularly, which was also a way to practice my English

Spanish is my native language, however, my mother advised my siblings and I to speak only English. This was because she was afraid that we would be rejected from professional careers if our English wasn 't unaccented, fluent, and similar in refinement to the working class whites. With time, I became a fluent English speaker with a developed Central American accent but like, any other young girl, I thought nothing of it. That is until one event, in particular, occurred that would cast a shadow of embarrassment onto my Spanish language. This event not only led me to desert my entire native language but a sense of my cultural identity, as well.

For a period of time I was an ESOL (English as a second language) classroom teacher. This meant part my class was native English speakers and the rest was native Spanish speakers. All of my little first graders had an entire year of culture appreciation and learning to be patient with one another. They learned about holidays which they both celebrated and holidays they did not have in common. When certain Spanish speaking students would get tired of finding the correct English words they would speak in Spanish.

As a new immigrant, I took the accuplacer test and went straight to 111 English level. So, English 111 course became my first college English class. It seems like a great achievement for a French speaker. Nonetheless, this performance linked to significant challenges. Even though I am a fighter and an optimist, I was frightened about my academic achievement for this semester. The problems became bigger when I took my first practice test on sentence structure (fragments and run-ons) and got a D. I was frightened and felt that I will have to drop the class. However, I decided not to give up. I started working hard and had a V+ on the next test. This positive grade energized me until now. During this semester, I have much homework and practices which allow me to identify some strengths, weaknesses, and gave me lots of skills for my English 112 class and the future.

According to Gleason and Ratner (2013), “In the United States, the proportion of children who are raised learning more than one language is estimated to be about 20 percent, with Spanish becoming the most common second language (Gleason & Ratner, 2013, p. 75). My interview this week was with a teacher, Mrs. T, who teaches young English learners. Mrs. T teaches children who are in the first grade. Because the school has a growing Hispanic population, the native language of the children she teaches is Spanish. The interview took place in her classroom during the last hour of the school day. I observed as she worked with one of her students in particular who seems to

I interviewed an Instructional Aide that I work with at Cottonwood Elementary. Her name is Marcela and she works with the Kindergartners. She moved from Argentina to New York when she was 3 years old and her first language was Spanish. Her mother put her in preschool when she turned 5, to help her learn English. Marcela shared with me that when she went to school she felt very sad, disconnected and was constantly looking for other children that spoke Spanish. She did find a girl who spoke Spanish and she became “buddies’ with her. The girl that she befriended would help her by translating everything the teacher would say, which was all in English. Marcela said she was speaking English by Kindergarten, but she must have had a strong accent because they put in her in speech

I speak primarily English, and a little bit of Spanish. I grew up in an English speak household; thus, I naturally learned English. In high school, I took three years of Spanish. My third year was an honors class, and I was a part of the National Spanish Honor Society.

There are a lot of kids taking Spanish because of how big it is in Texas, and even though they knew Spanish, there were also kids that grew up with it and took Spanish for an easy A. These kids would speak Spanish to each other when they didn’t want others to know what they were saying or that’s how their parents expected them to talk to family. Now they did have their own variations of Spanish including mine. However, they were still doing the same work that I was doing, and since they knew what the teacher was talking about they would apply their knowledge easier than I

Proficient writing is an essential skill in all aspects of academic and professional achievement. English 101, Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric, provided the framework to good writing, teaching me composition and rhetoric fundamentals, polishing up my grammar and style, and expressing a clear message. English 102, Composition, Rhetoric, and Research, continued to build on the skills I learned in English 101, focusing on the subject matter research process and employing various rhetorical and literary devices to better express a clear message to the reader. The course also improved my critical thinking capacity, allowing me to culturally evaluate my target audience, present logically flowing arguments using appropriate language and structure, and critically reviewing my writing projects for content and expression. Every writer inherently knows there’s always room to improve and I hold fast to this mindset in all academic, professional, and personal writing projects. English 102 has both challenged and inspired me to grow into a much better writer than before I began the class, providing the necessary skills to be not just a good writer, but a great writer.

My native language is Spanish and second language is English. The language I was first taught was Spanish, my parents and relatives all speak Spanish so it is my native language. When I started school at the age of 4 my teachers and classmates spoke only English. As the years passed by they started teaching me grammar rules and how to pronounce words. My parents spoke Spanish to me, but it was nothing compared to learning new nursery rhymes that helped me grasp the language without too much difficulty. I can communicate with people in Spanish but I feel like I have an accent with my Spanish. It does not come as naturally as my English does, I can say a sentence without thinking about it while Spanish I have to think of the meaning of words and I stutter when trying to say a complete sentence. At home I speak Spanish but when I am with friends, cousins, or out in public I only speak English.

Ms. Sullivan is a third grade teacher at an elementary school where English language learners (ELLs) make up approximately 85 percent of the student population. The majority of the third graders she teaches are of Asian, African American, and Hispanic ethnicities and seem to be within the intermediate stages of English language proficiency. In the video lesson, Ms. Sullivan presents a whole group math lesson measuring temperature using a thermometer. In this lesson, Ms. Sullivan utilizes a wide variety of sheltered instructional strategies to improve her ELLs’ language development.

learning English for me was a struggle when I got to the United states. because the transition between the two languages is very harsh and for Spanish speakers it makes it much harder. For example Spelling – In Spanish, words are spelled exactly how they sound. They don’t have any