Upon taking Second Language Acquisition, I thought learning a second language revolved around memorization. It wasn’t long into the course that I learned there were many aspects to learning a second language. I shortly realized that motivation, cognition, and social dimension played a huge role in SLA. Ortega (2013) states that, “Motivation is usually understood to refer to the desire to initiate L2 learning and the effort employed to sustain it, and in lay terms we all understand it to be a matter of quantity, as in the everyday observation that some learners are highly motivated and others have little or no motivation,” (p. 168) There are many forms of motivation, but integrativeness is the form of motivation that many ELL students attain. Ortega (2013) mentions on page 170, that “Of all antecedents, integrativeness is the one that has played the most central role in the development of a theory of foreig...
Learning an entire new language can be difficult for anyone. Now image being the younge age of five to ten years old trying to learn a new language. ELL students dont have easy days at school. Something that can make their day slightly easier depends on the teacher. “…studies in second language acquisition have made language teachers and curriculum designers aware that language learning consists of more than rule memorization” (Second Language Acquisition, 2008, p. 22) Expecting students to memorize terms of a language is not an efficient way for ESL students to succeed. My interviewee mentions that by having visuals available students are able to make these connections faster than memorization. This is one technique ESL teachers could use to ensure their students are learning the content instead of memorizing it. ...