Entry 2: Interview with an ELL
The
person I interviewed for this assignment was my grandmother Hannelore Fletcher.
She was born in Germany, so German was her first language. As you will learn
from the video, her second language was English. She learned English as her second
language because she moved from Germany to the united states. Click here to watch the interview.
I
learned a lot from this interview, like age and pace of learning a second
language for adults, second language learning methods and the difficulty of
learning a second language. the first connection that came to my attention in
my interview was the fact that my grandmother first started learning English at
21 years old. During the interview she stated that it took her 3 to 4 years to
become fluent in English. This length of time caught my attention because it
seemed like a long time to be in the US but not be fluent in English. Then I soon
made the connection to our textbook, “studies suggested that adult learners and
older children learned at a faster pace than younger children (Ortega, p.16,
2009). I could connect to this citation from the textbook because it did take
her a significant amount of time for her to become fluent in English.
The
other connection I made in the interview was the difficulty of learning the English
language. During the interview I asked Hannelore what difficulties she
encountered while learning English and she replied that the hardest part was
learning grammar of the English language. the factor that affected her the most
was the transferability of her German knowledge of language to the English language.
“Transferability refers to the claim that L1 transfer is partly a function of learner’s
intuitions about how transferable certain phenomena are” (Ortega, p. 38, 2009).
This meaning that she had trouble learning the English language because of
former grammar of the German language being transferred to the newly acquired English
language. overall the interview helped me learn a lot about learning a new language,
especially the time it takes to learn a new language and the circumstances it
takes too learn a new language.
Ortega, Lourdes. Second Language Acquisition.
London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
