Module 5: English Language and Adult Literacy

World Languages

I have always loved foreign language and I majored in Spanish in college. My original professional goal was to be a Spanish teacher, but I am honestly not a huge fan of children (even high school aged ones), so I switched to thinking about becoming an ESL teacher and living abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. While I had done the initial research of what becoming an ESL teacher would entail, ultimately my career path took a turn and I let that idea (better yet dream) go away. Revisiting this topic this week has made me consider the possibility of marrying that youthful dream to my current professional skill portfolio. While I do not intend of using this sub-field in the practicum, I am not considering the potential of using the skills I have honed as an adult educator and seeing how I could maybe leverage them in this space. 

I had also always thought that children were better equipped to learn language, so I was heartened to learn from the article by Smith and Strong that "Research has also shown that adult learners have greater cognitive and linguistic capabilities and conceptual complexity than younger learners (Robinson, 2005), although these capabilities (e.g., attention span, information processing of a rich and complex range of input, memory storage capacity) may vary from learner to learner." I have struggled to learn a third language - my brain always defaults to Spanish any time I try to learn a different foreign language. It is almost as though my brain thinks, "We're using a foreign language? It must be Spanish." I attributed this phenomenon to me just being older now, but I guess that is not exactly accurate. Time to try again!

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