Entry 2: Interview with Hung Phan
Hi all, below is my interview with someone who learned English as a second language as a child and my reflection. Thank you for visiting blog entry 2.
Click here for interview video
The interviewee Hung Phan is a close friend who learned English as a second language at the age of 11 when he moved from Vietnam to the United States. He began feeling confident in his L2 after 2 years and is fluent in both languages now. His learning environment at the New Arrival Center (NAC) program seemed to really benefit his second language acquisition.
Hearing about the NAC program was interesting and new to me. Learning English with peers who are on the same level of language acquisition seemed helpful for Hung. Ortega notes “grammar acquisition cannot be successful without applying ‘interest’, ‘attention’ and ‘hard work’ to the task of cracking the language code” (2009, p. 58). Hung’s community of learners and attitude to his learning environment helped fuel that interest, attention, and hard work for himself.
Having a community of English learners allowed Hung to have interactions in a naturalistic setting. It was also interesting to see possible traces of interaction hypothesis implemented in his prior learning. This is where learners “strive to make meaning more comprehensible for each other, that is, to negotiate for meaning” (Ortega, 2009, p. 61). Hung can be seen making a clarification request when one of my questions is not clear. This is a practice I have noticed before, and this could be a familiar tool he uses to navigate English.
It is clear from Hung’s experience that a proper learning environment supports SLA. The learner’s community can positively affect SLA, but there is also a large responsibility on the learner. The main focus should be on the learner’s intrinsic motivations and drive to learn through meaningful interaction.
Click here for interview video
The interviewee Hung Phan is a close friend who learned English as a second language at the age of 11 when he moved from Vietnam to the United States. He began feeling confident in his L2 after 2 years and is fluent in both languages now. His learning environment at the New Arrival Center (NAC) program seemed to really benefit his second language acquisition.
Hearing about the NAC program was interesting and new to me. Learning English with peers who are on the same level of language acquisition seemed helpful for Hung. Ortega notes “grammar acquisition cannot be successful without applying ‘interest’, ‘attention’ and ‘hard work’ to the task of cracking the language code” (2009, p. 58). Hung’s community of learners and attitude to his learning environment helped fuel that interest, attention, and hard work for himself.
Having a community of English learners allowed Hung to have interactions in a naturalistic setting. It was also interesting to see possible traces of interaction hypothesis implemented in his prior learning. This is where learners “strive to make meaning more comprehensible for each other, that is, to negotiate for meaning” (Ortega, 2009, p. 61). Hung can be seen making a clarification request when one of my questions is not clear. This is a practice I have noticed before, and this could be a familiar tool he uses to navigate English.
It is clear from Hung’s experience that a proper learning environment supports SLA. The learner’s community can positively affect SLA, but there is also a large responsibility on the learner. The main focus should be on the learner’s intrinsic motivations and drive to learn through meaningful interaction.
Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding Second Language Acquisition (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Hi Franklin! I’m also Vietnamese so I found really cool to watch your video and see if I would be able to relate. I was not, because I was born in American so the obstacles that your friend, Hung, faced were a little different than mine. I agree that being around others who are at the same language proficiently level as you can be a great help. Ortega stated that “using a cognitive-interactionist prism. Languages are almost always learned with and for others, and these others generate linguistic evidence, rich or poor, abundant or scarce, that surrounds learners” (Ortega, 2013, p55).
ReplyDeleteOrtega, Lourdes. Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge, 2013. Print
Hey Lam, yeah I cannot relate to Hung’s experience either despite having learned Vietnamese first. He had already built about a decade of experience in his L1 and the culture, so had a lot to catch up on coming to america. Schumann predicted that a learner’s outcome will become more successful the more acculturated a learner can become (Ortega, 2013, p. 59). Hung’s English was supported through the NAC program, but his English improved even more whenever he came out of the program and had more natural experiences in English.
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DeleteHi, Franklin! When I initially read the name of who you were interviewing, I believed that I knew him. However, the Hung Phan I went to elementary school with immigrated to the U.S. when he was three. When I heard your interviewee’s voice, I knew he was a different Hung Phan. Anyways, that was exciting for me. Hung shared much of his feelings and experiences from his first school year in the U.S. The way he said certain sentences prompted me to analyze them. “I start learning, when I was in like sixth grade” (1). “And she also have a assistant teacher” (2). “Teacher was really good in carrying out her lessons about English” (3). “Those two teacher kind of walk around and guide us through the lessons” (4). Sentence 1 has a present continuous verb format “start learning”, rather than the simple past tense (started) or past continuous tense (started learning). Sentence 2 uses the plural present tense “have” to describe a singular pronoun and a past situation. Sentences 2 employs “a” instead on ‘an’, which is an irregular form of the indefinite article, while sentence 3 is missing the definite article ‘the’ before the word teacher. Lastly, in sentence 4, the word ‘teacher’ is missing a pluralization signifying (s). I do not have much knowledge of Hung’s L1 of Vietnamese, but I cannot help but wonder if these are examples of negative transfer from his L1. It is important to note that although he struggled with implementing the past tense of action verbs, successfully and consistently applied the past tense to the being verb, is, and the present tense. This overuse of the present tense and underuse of the past tense is reminiscent of a case explained by Ortega (2009), in which “a single L1 form (the passé composé) corresponds to two forms in English, the past simple and the present perfect. This present perfect overlap (or crucial similarity, in Wode’s terms; cf. 3.2) is misleading and primes L1 French learners of English to overuse the present perfect, supplying it in contexts where English speakers would use the simple past” (p.44). This sentiment about French-English past and present perfect tense association may bear some truth pertaining to a similar relationship between Vietnamese and English. When it comes to his inconsistent use of articles, this may be because of an element being marked in English and unmarked in Vietnamese. There are “a closed set of possibilities within a linguistic system, where the given possibilities rank from simplest and most frequent across languages of the world, or unmarked, to most complex and most rare, or marked”, in which marked characteristic are more difficult to learn (Ortega, 2009, p.37). Because they are less salient.
ReplyDeleteOrtega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Education.
Hey Audrey, it is really interesting that you broke down his English so meticulously. I hear that kind of accent and sentence structure so often that it is familiar to me. Getting to analyze his speaking in writing was really cool because I could try to decipher his crosslinguistic influences. His improper use of past tense verbs may have a connection to how the Vietnamese language works. There is not a past form for verbs, for instance to say “I went home” the Vietnamese translation would be “I have go(gone) home”. This is an example of how his knowledge in “L1 results in subtle influences that remain beneath the surface and are easy to miss or can be readily misinterpreted” (Ortega, 2013, p. 44).
DeleteHi Franklin,
ReplyDeleteAfter watching your video and reading your reflection, I think it was great that your friend Hung had a good naturalistic environment to practice and have interaction in those settings. The books says that "..L2 words learned in naturalistic contexts allows for the encoding of richer information in episodic memory than L2 words learned in classrooms..." (Ortega, 2013, pg. 89) Referring to Ortega, being an instructional learner can be great, but learning in naturalistic ways can also be very beneficial in it's own way. Allowing one to be in a natural setting allows one to practice things learned in instruction while learning things that cannot be taught by instruction. For example, naturalistic settings can allow someone learn the "slang" that is used which won't be taught in instructions.
Ortega, Lourdes. Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
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DeleteHey Joseph, the naturalistic setting would definitely help learners understand those more cultural nuances to English, for instance Slang as mentioned. Learners like Hung would need support in the interaction hypothesis, so they have the appropriate skills to navigate English themselves. Learners would have to “strive to make meaning more comprehensible for each other, that is, to negotiate for meaning” (Ortega, 2013, p. 61). Teachers cannot always be there to clarify meaning for learners, so we must support their autonomy in SLA.
DeleteHi Joseph,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. Learning in an natural setting is always better than learning in a classroom. I feel that nothing teaches you better than live, on the spot, converse between two people. When this takes place, the L2 learner can began to link emotion next to the words. "Aneta Pavlenko (1999) has explored the hypothesis that L2 words learned in naturalistic contexts allow for the encoding of richer information in episodic memory than L2 words learned in classrooms" (Ortega p.89) You stated that Allowing one to be in a natural setting allows one to practice things learned in instruction while learning things that cannot be taught by instruction. That is true because one can correct you if you use a word improperly in a natural setting, but the essence of the culture won't be reciprocally mentioned in the classroom.
Hey Lawrence, I like that mention that learners get to converse in a live situation and have to link meanings to words. That is exactly the goal of the interaction hypothesis. Learners will have to work on comprehensible input and output as well negotiating for meaning. Observing how Hung talks, he seems familiar with clarification requests, confirmation checks, and comprehension checks. It is interesting to see how he has adapted to learning English in that way.
DeleteHello Frank,
ReplyDeleteIt seems that school played an extremely important part in Hung's life. After watching many videos, it seems that he is the second to oldest person I viewed. The oldest was 15, but that interviewee came from a Latin country which has many similarities as English. For example Spanish and English are both subject prominent as stated in Ortega (ch. 3 p.35). However coming from the Vietnam, a topic prominent language, I know it could be difficult. Especially in middle school. However, the program the Hung entered was very good to advance him ahead as successfully as he stated. Today I would refer to Hung as a balanced bilingual because he fluently speaks two languages. I kindly disagree with Lam, because I feel you need someone with a higher level of fluency than you to successfully grasp not only the morphology and syntax of the language, but also the semantics of it as well.
The transition from Vietnamese to English is definitely more difficult and not just because of the lack in similarities between the languages. There is also less resources to help Vietnamese students in SLA as compared to Spanish. Fortunately, the NAC program was the next best thing for him. You bring up a good point in your response to Lam. The learners get to practice in a safe environment with learners of similar SLA levels, so they may be deprived of opportunities for negative feedback. I wonder then if receiving negative feedback from just instructors would be enough for the learners?
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