Blog Entry 2

As our world is changing, I feel like everything is also changing. Change does not have to necessarily mean a bad thing. It could actually be for the better. This is what I believe about the impacts that research has on teaching practices today. Through time, our teaching practices have shown progress from learning to just look educated or intelligent to actually learning how to communicate orally with others. As it further states, “because there was little if any theoretical research on SLA in general or on the acquisition of reading proficiency, foreign languages were taught as any other skill was taught” (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.17). Later, more teaching methodologies were developed, which show a sign of growth.

It is important for the profession of SLA to have research on how second, foreign or additional language is best learned because they want to ensure that what they are doing is appropriate and to learn even more on how to help their students. I believe that as teachers we are constantly growing and learning. Therefore, teachers would like to have evidence or reasoning to back up their actions and also to not waste time on techniques that do not match the needs of a certain student. According to Purpura (2014), it is crucial to include “a further dimension to strategy training by considering the various stages of processing that earners go through” (p.53). This demonstrates the importance of having background knowledge along with facts from research to put forth a strategy to take place.

From my experience, I took Spanish for two years to fulfill my foreign language credits. I started to learn Spanish in middle school and continue to high school. When I started off my first year learning Spanish, I was actually excited about learning. As time passed by, the class had nothing to offer but countless of worksheets and book work. I decided to not take the third year of Spanish because I felt like I was not getting anywhere. As it mentions, “foreign language learning meant a tedious experience of memorizing endless lists if unusable grammar rules and vocabulary (Brown & Lee, 2015, p. 18). My teacher taught through the Grammar Translation Method, which put more emphasis on learning how to read and write than to actually communicate with others. Now and then, I can recognize Spanish when I see or hear it, but my pronunciation still needs a lot of work.