A- Attached or single: Attached
B- Best Friend: Kevin. Except when it comes to chick flicks or clothes or anything terribly feminine. Then I guess it's my girls from Two Good Things.
C-Cake or Pie: Cake. I especially love the Costco chocolate cake that if you get a 1" slice, it's too big and too rich. :) Mmmmm!
D- Day of Choice: Monday. I know most people hate Mondays, but I feel like it's the one day of the week that I'm actually refreshed from resting all weekend.
E- Essential Item (s): it's not really an item, but I can't go without showering in the morning. I also can't go without toilet paper. I just learned this one about myself: I can't talk to my students about their papers without a pen in hand.
F- Favorite Color: Green. But sometimes orange is fun to spice things up a bit
G- Gummi Bears or Worms: sour worms
H- Hometown: Los Alamos, NM
I- Indulgence(s): Chocolate ice cream, brownies, cheap pizza
J- January or July: Definitely July, but not in Utah. July in New Mexico, where it is hot all day and then rains in the afternoon, cooling it off for the evening. That's perfection.
K-Kids: I love kids. I just don't have any yet.
M- Marriage Date: 12 August, 2005
N- Number of Siblings: 3 brothers, 1 sister, plus a bunch of brothers- and sisters-in-law
O- Oranges or Apples: Either, if they're in season. But blegch! for crunchy oranges, and blegch! for mushy apples!
P- Phobias or Fears: Intense parts of movies where someone might jump out at you.
Q- Quote(s): "The women I love the most in the world are the ones I've sung with." --Melanie McCord (she's in my ward and organized a young mother's chorus... and I come too)
R- Reason To Smile: Kevin likes to sing songs, changing the words so they're all about me. For example: "I believe in Chelsea-cles. You sexy thing! (you sexy thing)"
S- Season: Autumn. I think I did a blog post about this at the very beginning of my blog. I love the crispness and I loved the hours I spent outside in the fall during marching band.
T- Tag Six: no
U- Unknown Fact About Me: I hate wearing makeup because it makes me feel grimy
V- Vegetarian or Oppressor of Animal: both. I love meat, but I often try to eat more vegetables than meat.
W- Worst Habit: chewing with my mouth open, especially when I have a cold
X- X-Rays or Ultrasounds: I've had a few X-Rays, mostly on my ankles
Y- Your Favorite Food: Green Chile Enchiladas
Z: Zodiac: Virgo, year of the Dog (ironic, actually, since I hate dogs)
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Weirdness Happens
We live at the end of a dead-end street. Once you get to the end of the dead-end, you have to take a dirt road that leads to our driveway which you follow until you get to our house. So we're pretty secluded.
It's 5:15. I got home at like 3:00 and took a nap. Before my nap, there was a white mini-van parked up on the dead-end, and now it is still there. I used to think it was maybe a mom waiting while her kids were in piano lessons or something. Or maybe someone just wanted to escape from the world and come somewhere quiet.
And then on that vacant lot up there, there's always a pile of trash: coffee cups, beer cans, and cigarette butts. When we first moved in, I figured there were some stupid teenagers who would come there to dump stuff after their parties.
But I can see that you, dear reader, have put two and two together much more quickly than I.
Yes, this lady sits in her car and drinks coffee and beer, smoking cigarettes out the window. She then tosses her trash on the street and leaves after a couple hours. By all accounts, she looks like a normal, upstanding member of society. If it weren't for this strange habit of secretly consuming legal drugs on our driveway, I'd say she was just your typical Utah mom type.
What a sad, sad double life.
It's 5:15. I got home at like 3:00 and took a nap. Before my nap, there was a white mini-van parked up on the dead-end, and now it is still there. I used to think it was maybe a mom waiting while her kids were in piano lessons or something. Or maybe someone just wanted to escape from the world and come somewhere quiet.
And then on that vacant lot up there, there's always a pile of trash: coffee cups, beer cans, and cigarette butts. When we first moved in, I figured there were some stupid teenagers who would come there to dump stuff after their parties.
But I can see that you, dear reader, have put two and two together much more quickly than I.
Yes, this lady sits in her car and drinks coffee and beer, smoking cigarettes out the window. She then tosses her trash on the street and leaves after a couple hours. By all accounts, she looks like a normal, upstanding member of society. If it weren't for this strange habit of secretly consuming legal drugs on our driveway, I'd say she was just your typical Utah mom type.
What a sad, sad double life.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Ahh, romance
On Valentine's Day in my ESL class, we made valentines. One of my classes got busy writing their cards (in English), and while they were writing, I read them a sappy romantic story out of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. During the story, I would slow down during the really cheesy lines, making sure they understood me. My class was enthralled! They are all 8th grade girls (4 of them... it's a small class), and there were times where they actually squealed at the romance in this cheesy story.
Then after the story, one of them told me all about how she and her friend and her friend's mom like to watch this one certain Spanish soap opera. There is a woman with amnesia whose husband married a beautiful-but-evil woman, and then the first woman came back, and it was so sad. She and her friend and her friend's mom were all sitting on the couch crying.
Then it finally hit me. If my students are so into these chick stories, so much even that Livier--who never speaks English if she doesn't have to--will tell me a whole story in English, I have to do something about it.
I came home and started writing ideas down for a cheesy high school love drama. And since I cannot for the life of me come up with interesting plots of my own, I am adapting the plot of Pride and Prejudice. It has been done many times before, and I really like some of them. So I will add to the genre of "wannabe Austen" authors.
My story right now is only a few pages long, and it's crap. Seriously, when I read stuff like this, I wonder how the world can go forward with crap like this being published as literature. Thankfully, it is my first draft, and I will revise it. :)
Then after the story, one of them told me all about how she and her friend and her friend's mom like to watch this one certain Spanish soap opera. There is a woman with amnesia whose husband married a beautiful-but-evil woman, and then the first woman came back, and it was so sad. She and her friend and her friend's mom were all sitting on the couch crying.
Then it finally hit me. If my students are so into these chick stories, so much even that Livier--who never speaks English if she doesn't have to--will tell me a whole story in English, I have to do something about it.
I came home and started writing ideas down for a cheesy high school love drama. And since I cannot for the life of me come up with interesting plots of my own, I am adapting the plot of Pride and Prejudice. It has been done many times before, and I really like some of them. So I will add to the genre of "wannabe Austen" authors.
My story right now is only a few pages long, and it's crap. Seriously, when I read stuff like this, I wonder how the world can go forward with crap like this being published as literature. Thankfully, it is my first draft, and I will revise it. :)
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Writing Assignment.
I had to write a paper for my Child and Adolescent Development class I finished yesterday. This paper was worth 12% of my grade. I wrote the paper, and I learned a lot of interesting things while doing the research. Here is the assignment:
Write a 1750-2450-word paper analyzing the importance of understanding the stages of human development in the classroom. Analyze some of the problems that might result from a teacher’s lack of such understanding. Focusing on one stage (e.g., early childhood), include a discussion of teacher behaviors that would promote students’ thinking abilities, behaviors that would help students achieve greater success, and behaviors that would promote the social and emotional well-being of the individual student as well as improve the classroom environment for children in that stage. Include classroom practices and materials that you feel promote diversity and equity within the educational experience.
This assignment was graded this way: 4 points for readability and mechanics, and 8 points for content. The content rubric was subdivided in this way:--All key elements of the assignment are covered in a substantive way
--Introduction, body, and conclusion are evident and flow together
--Major points are stated and supported by specific details or examples
So, you be the teacher... how do you think I did in content? Be mean, be honest, be brutal. I know I missed a couple sections. But I want to know what you would give me, for content, on a scale of 0-8.
Language Acquisition in Secondary-Level Students: Learning a Foreign Language in High School
Human babies are born with the capacity and potential to learn language very quickly. As young children learn language naturally and easily, they smoothly transition from nonverbal to fluent. A young child can learn even several languages with relative ease. As a child grows older, however, the language acquisition process changes. What was once natural and nearly effortless now becomes a struggle. In the United States, foreign languages are not taught in schools until the secondary level, after puberty, when a child’s brain has progressed to the point where acquisition is not the smooth, natural process it once was. This presents specific problems and challenges to teachers who choose to teach second languages to students. While the secondary-level student will most likely never achieve native-level fluency in the second language begun in middle or high school, there are teaching techniques that can aid the student as much as possible. Some of these techniques mimic the language acquisition strategies of babies learning their first language. But most of these techniques are specifically targeted to address the older learner’s language acquisition style.
Soon after a baby is born, he begins cooing and babbling, which are the universal beginnings of speech. Even deaf babies who do not babble sounds will babble using their fingers. At this stage and subsequent stages, babies understand more language than they can express. As the baby learns how to use language, he gestures and then begins to name the people, things, and actions most familiar to him. By the age of 16-24 months old, he learns words for so many things that experts call it a “naming explosion” (Bee, 2002). He learns words in groups, such as types of fruit or words with similar meanings (Bee, 2002). Most of these words are nouns, with a few verbs mixed in.
The baby’s grammar develops from one-word holophrases to two-word and then many-word phrases. A holophrase is a word such as ‘milk,’ which when said by the young child, means, ‘I want my milk.’ Two-word sentences are similarly two words used to stand for longer phrases. “The first two-word sentences usually appear between 18 and 24 months. This is not a random or independent event. Recent research… suggests that sentences appear only when a child has reached some threshold level of vocabulary size—somewhere around 100 to 200 words” (Bee, 2002). Once babies begin talking at this level, they start developing their vocabulary, adding suffixes to nouns and verbs. Around the age of 27-36 months, babies go through a “grammar explosion.” Because they have a significant repertoire of vocabulary, they begin to learn grammatical rules, such as adding ‘-ing’ to the end of verbs and using negative construction (e.g. ‘This is not mine’). In English, this is when babies begin to learn the rules for using verbs in the past tense. Babies learn the general rule first (add ‘-ed’ to the end) and use it universally. Then they learn the many exceptions one-by-one when their parents correct them. Babies who simultaneously learn two languages (one from each parent, perhaps) generally lag behind their monolingual peers in the earlier developmental stages. However, they catch up by the age of two or three, and the child then has two native languages.
Parents and caretakers teach a language to a baby not by lecturing him, but by interacting with him. One type of interaction is called “motherese” (Bee, 2002). Motherese is simply how a mother talks to her child, especially in contrast to how she talks to other adults. A baby learns from the mother’s example, such as when the baby says, ‘this hat,’ and the mother corrects it saying, ‘Yes, this is a hat.’ Another interaction that increases a child’s vocabulary is “dialogic reading” (Bee, 2002). This is when an adult reads to a child, asking them questions such as ‘What is this?’ (while pointing to the page) or ‘What is the puppy doing?’ These interactions engage the child’s mind and have been shown to significantly increase a child’s vocabulary, even over a short period of time (Bee, 2002). Also, the act of reading introduces new words and new linguistic patterns that the child may otherwise not hear on a day-to-day basis.
One interesting thing about studying language acquisition is that babies almost universally acquire language. Barring serious learning impediments, children always become fluent in their mother tongues. However, the same cannot be said for learning a second language in middle school or high school. Adolescents learning foreign languages are largely unsuccessful (Zhongganggao, 2001). It seems that by the time a person goes through puberty, language acquisition is over, and older learners approach learning a language the way they would approach learning any other subject. After puberty, the brain is not as pliable or formable as a child’s. Adolescents and adults are past the so-called “critical period” (Zhongganggao, 2001) where language is acquired in a natural, unforced way. It may be impossible for adolescents or adults to approach language learning the way a baby approaches language acquisition. In addition to the physical constraints, there is usually a social constraint. Older learners generally want to speak about more complex ideas than a baby does. They are accustomed to speaking their native language at a certain level, and they may not be satisfied with only learning to speak a language beginning with simple, two-word phrases. They want to be able to translate their thoughts and ideas into the different language at the same complexity as their native tongue. So the stages of language acquisition are rushed or omitted entirely when teaching a language to a secondary-level student.
Some of the language acquisition stages would be of little use to an older language learner. For example, the stages of cooing and babbling are useful for a baby to learn the purpose of language, and it can be assumed that if students are capable of communicating in their native language, they are capable of understanding the purpose of language. A naming explosion would probably not be as spontaneous in an older student as in a baby. The repetition of ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ would seem tedious, and the praise (‘good job!’) insincere, to a secondary-level learner. Also, an adolescent would probably find holophrases and two-word phrases too limiting, preferring instead to use more complex sentences and grammar to express his thoughts.
There are, however, many aspects of children’s linguistic acquisition that could be directly applicable to secondary-level students. When learning a language, both babies and adolescents generally comprehend more than they can personally express. Also, babies seem to prepare themselves with an arsenal of words before they start combining them into grammatical phrases. It may be valuable to approach second-language learning in a similar way. It might be better to first spend time learning vocabulary, simulating a naming explosion, before delving into complex grammatical studies. Once the older students have spent adequate time building their arsenals of words, along with basic grammar of course, they will be ready for a future grammar explosion.
To an adolescent, motherese may sound condescending and insulting. However, the principle of motherese may be adjusted to be applicable to older students of foreign languages. When a student makes a slight error in grammar or pronunciation, the teacher can affirm the correctness of what the student did say, while correcting the slight mistake in a positive way.
Dialogic reading has been shown to increase a child’s linguistic abilities, and it likewise could increase the second-language abilities of secondary-level students. When a teacher reads to students, she models the language and exposes them to linguistic patterns. When the teacher engages in dialogic reading, she can encourage her students to use their minds to create ideas in the new language, instead of hearing it only.
Motivation is also a variable in the language learning process. Small children are motivated to learn a language because they have an innate need to communicate. When adolescents study a second language in school, most often (in the United States at least) it is not taken to fulfill the need to communicate. It is usually taken as a requirement for grades, graduation, and/or making oneself more appealing to colleges (Yu, 2007). These are motivators, but they do not contain the same pressing need that a child experiences when learning how to express themselves. When teachers use linguistic immersion methods in their classrooms, this urgency is recreated in a small measure. There should also be an easy, relaxed, conversational environment, which encourages the students to use the language they are studying (Yu, 2007).
When teaching a secondary-level second language course, perhaps it would be beneficial to teach them a lesson on language acquisition. Since the students are most likely learning a foreign language for the first time, they would not have strategies to apply towards learning this new skill. They might find it interesting to learn how their brains worked as children. Then the class could discuss what would or wouldn’t work for them now that they are adolescents. The students could share their ideas on how linguistic acquisition could be modified to reach adolescents. The students could share their ideas and the teacher hers. Then everyone could approach the language class as something different than just learning another subject in school.
Adolescents are cognitively very different than young children learning their first language. Young children’s brains have a plasticity that is a fertile ground for learning language. And once they reach puberty, that plasticity hardens. Therefore, some of the stages of language acquisition would hardly be worth attempting because of the differences in the cognitive developments of babies and teens. Yet many aspects of language acquisition can be recreated to mimic the process of learning a first language when an adolescent is learning a second language. A secondary-level foreign language teacher should be aware of the process of language acquisition so she can adapt, apply, and even use it in her classroom.
Soon after a baby is born, he begins cooing and babbling, which are the universal beginnings of speech. Even deaf babies who do not babble sounds will babble using their fingers. At this stage and subsequent stages, babies understand more language than they can express. As the baby learns how to use language, he gestures and then begins to name the people, things, and actions most familiar to him. By the age of 16-24 months old, he learns words for so many things that experts call it a “naming explosion” (Bee, 2002). He learns words in groups, such as types of fruit or words with similar meanings (Bee, 2002). Most of these words are nouns, with a few verbs mixed in.
The baby’s grammar develops from one-word holophrases to two-word and then many-word phrases. A holophrase is a word such as ‘milk,’ which when said by the young child, means, ‘I want my milk.’ Two-word sentences are similarly two words used to stand for longer phrases. “The first two-word sentences usually appear between 18 and 24 months. This is not a random or independent event. Recent research… suggests that sentences appear only when a child has reached some threshold level of vocabulary size—somewhere around 100 to 200 words” (Bee, 2002). Once babies begin talking at this level, they start developing their vocabulary, adding suffixes to nouns and verbs. Around the age of 27-36 months, babies go through a “grammar explosion.” Because they have a significant repertoire of vocabulary, they begin to learn grammatical rules, such as adding ‘-ing’ to the end of verbs and using negative construction (e.g. ‘This is not mine’). In English, this is when babies begin to learn the rules for using verbs in the past tense. Babies learn the general rule first (add ‘-ed’ to the end) and use it universally. Then they learn the many exceptions one-by-one when their parents correct them. Babies who simultaneously learn two languages (one from each parent, perhaps) generally lag behind their monolingual peers in the earlier developmental stages. However, they catch up by the age of two or three, and the child then has two native languages.
Parents and caretakers teach a language to a baby not by lecturing him, but by interacting with him. One type of interaction is called “motherese” (Bee, 2002). Motherese is simply how a mother talks to her child, especially in contrast to how she talks to other adults. A baby learns from the mother’s example, such as when the baby says, ‘this hat,’ and the mother corrects it saying, ‘Yes, this is a hat.’ Another interaction that increases a child’s vocabulary is “dialogic reading” (Bee, 2002). This is when an adult reads to a child, asking them questions such as ‘What is this?’ (while pointing to the page) or ‘What is the puppy doing?’ These interactions engage the child’s mind and have been shown to significantly increase a child’s vocabulary, even over a short period of time (Bee, 2002). Also, the act of reading introduces new words and new linguistic patterns that the child may otherwise not hear on a day-to-day basis.
One interesting thing about studying language acquisition is that babies almost universally acquire language. Barring serious learning impediments, children always become fluent in their mother tongues. However, the same cannot be said for learning a second language in middle school or high school. Adolescents learning foreign languages are largely unsuccessful (Zhongganggao, 2001). It seems that by the time a person goes through puberty, language acquisition is over, and older learners approach learning a language the way they would approach learning any other subject. After puberty, the brain is not as pliable or formable as a child’s. Adolescents and adults are past the so-called “critical period” (Zhongganggao, 2001) where language is acquired in a natural, unforced way. It may be impossible for adolescents or adults to approach language learning the way a baby approaches language acquisition. In addition to the physical constraints, there is usually a social constraint. Older learners generally want to speak about more complex ideas than a baby does. They are accustomed to speaking their native language at a certain level, and they may not be satisfied with only learning to speak a language beginning with simple, two-word phrases. They want to be able to translate their thoughts and ideas into the different language at the same complexity as their native tongue. So the stages of language acquisition are rushed or omitted entirely when teaching a language to a secondary-level student.
Some of the language acquisition stages would be of little use to an older language learner. For example, the stages of cooing and babbling are useful for a baby to learn the purpose of language, and it can be assumed that if students are capable of communicating in their native language, they are capable of understanding the purpose of language. A naming explosion would probably not be as spontaneous in an older student as in a baby. The repetition of ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ would seem tedious, and the praise (‘good job!’) insincere, to a secondary-level learner. Also, an adolescent would probably find holophrases and two-word phrases too limiting, preferring instead to use more complex sentences and grammar to express his thoughts.
There are, however, many aspects of children’s linguistic acquisition that could be directly applicable to secondary-level students. When learning a language, both babies and adolescents generally comprehend more than they can personally express. Also, babies seem to prepare themselves with an arsenal of words before they start combining them into grammatical phrases. It may be valuable to approach second-language learning in a similar way. It might be better to first spend time learning vocabulary, simulating a naming explosion, before delving into complex grammatical studies. Once the older students have spent adequate time building their arsenals of words, along with basic grammar of course, they will be ready for a future grammar explosion.
To an adolescent, motherese may sound condescending and insulting. However, the principle of motherese may be adjusted to be applicable to older students of foreign languages. When a student makes a slight error in grammar or pronunciation, the teacher can affirm the correctness of what the student did say, while correcting the slight mistake in a positive way.
Dialogic reading has been shown to increase a child’s linguistic abilities, and it likewise could increase the second-language abilities of secondary-level students. When a teacher reads to students, she models the language and exposes them to linguistic patterns. When the teacher engages in dialogic reading, she can encourage her students to use their minds to create ideas in the new language, instead of hearing it only.
Motivation is also a variable in the language learning process. Small children are motivated to learn a language because they have an innate need to communicate. When adolescents study a second language in school, most often (in the United States at least) it is not taken to fulfill the need to communicate. It is usually taken as a requirement for grades, graduation, and/or making oneself more appealing to colleges (Yu, 2007). These are motivators, but they do not contain the same pressing need that a child experiences when learning how to express themselves. When teachers use linguistic immersion methods in their classrooms, this urgency is recreated in a small measure. There should also be an easy, relaxed, conversational environment, which encourages the students to use the language they are studying (Yu, 2007).
When teaching a secondary-level second language course, perhaps it would be beneficial to teach them a lesson on language acquisition. Since the students are most likely learning a foreign language for the first time, they would not have strategies to apply towards learning this new skill. They might find it interesting to learn how their brains worked as children. Then the class could discuss what would or wouldn’t work for them now that they are adolescents. The students could share their ideas on how linguistic acquisition could be modified to reach adolescents. The students could share their ideas and the teacher hers. Then everyone could approach the language class as something different than just learning another subject in school.
Adolescents are cognitively very different than young children learning their first language. Young children’s brains have a plasticity that is a fertile ground for learning language. And once they reach puberty, that plasticity hardens. Therefore, some of the stages of language acquisition would hardly be worth attempting because of the differences in the cognitive developments of babies and teens. Yet many aspects of language acquisition can be recreated to mimic the process of learning a first language when an adolescent is learning a second language. A secondary-level foreign language teacher should be aware of the process of language acquisition so she can adapt, apply, and even use it in her classroom.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Stake Conference
This morning we had stake conference. It was actually held in the Provo Tabernacle, but we watched it on TV in the Stake Center behind our house. We got there early so we could sit on the comfortable chairs.
So after about an hour in the dimmed lights and on the comfy chairs, Kevin started dozing. Actually, if you talk to him, he'll probably tell you he was just listening with his eyes closed. I didn't hear any snoring, so that story may be plausible.
Anyway, there was a little girl sitting in front of us playing with her Polly Pocket dolls on the floor. She must have been about 5 years old. She saw Kevin sleeping and thought it was just the funniest thing she'd ever seen! She got the attention of her friend, who was sitting in front of her, and the two of them thought it was so funny! I mean, here is a grown man SLEEPING in a meeting.
I in turn thought they were so funny! It was a fun meeting.
So after about an hour in the dimmed lights and on the comfy chairs, Kevin started dozing. Actually, if you talk to him, he'll probably tell you he was just listening with his eyes closed. I didn't hear any snoring, so that story may be plausible.
Anyway, there was a little girl sitting in front of us playing with her Polly Pocket dolls on the floor. She must have been about 5 years old. She saw Kevin sleeping and thought it was just the funniest thing she'd ever seen! She got the attention of her friend, who was sitting in front of her, and the two of them thought it was so funny! I mean, here is a grown man SLEEPING in a meeting.
I in turn thought they were so funny! It was a fun meeting.
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