February 23 2009

Class started out with Aaron and Kizuna’s presentation. I thought their presentation was interesting because they talked about why and what ELL students have difficulties with. Some of the difficulties that Kizuna mentioned were stress patterns, intonations, rhythm, and so forth. I think that ELL students have many difficulties that many native speakers may or may not know about. A couple of the difficulties that I think that ELL students have are the language structure differences and the amount of exposure to the second language. During a discussion of Aaron and Kizuna’s presentation, Stephanie mentioned that she thinks non- native speakers actually speaks more formal. I think that many ELL students or non- native speakers want to sound know and feel like when they are speaking, they sound correct. Therefore, it makes them sound very “bookish” and ELL students don’t want to sound that way. We went to the GLL room and attempted to do a listening activity but some of the computers were not working so half of the class was assigned with an activity for ELL students.