Interview with a Second language learner
Blog 2 composition For my Second blog entry, I am interviewing my girlfriend. Her name is Mandy Yang. Her first language is Chinese, and she was born in a small village in China. She first started learning English at around age five. Mandy says that the way she began learning English was from her elementary school, where she was placed in a separate class to learn English one hour a day. In Ortega’s book, Languages in school may experience as little as 540 hours of actual instructional L2 exposure in a course of five years. (Ortega, 2011, p. 17). During her elementary years, Mandy says that she did not speak or participate as much and had a silent period for as long as 3-4 years. With the level of exposure to classroom setting and learning, she may not have learned English as well as she did if she was learning it without being immersed in the language. However, because she is being exposed to English every day, she was able to pick up on the grammar and words that she recogniz...