In the shoes of my ELL students

This trip has helped me a lot as far as understanding my student’s struggles with learning as ELL students.  Being put into a situation where I have to be able to learn without being able to speak my native language has helped me greatly when being a teacher.  I understand that there are a lot of important things to help create success at teaching my students.  For me, when I was sitting in my Spanish classes I had trouble understanding what the teacher was saying even if he/she was speaking slowly.  I needed her to write the words out on the board for me understand what she was saying.  I could understand the written language better than the spoken language.  This was a huge shock to me because I am primarily an auditory/musical learner.  I was surprised to find out that when it comes to a new language I’m more of a visual learner.  I think this can help me with my future teaching because it shows just how important it is every area of intelligence is used to teach.  I feel like I have always been aware that information should be presented to students in many different ways, but after this experience I realize even more just how important it is, especially for my ELL students.  I feel like this experience has also showed me just how stressful it is to not be allowed to use your own native language.  There were several times when I had trouble not talking to my classmates in English.  If I was having as much trouble as I was having with this I know that it will be even harder for my students.  Where I would like to allow them to be able to speak in their native language some I also know that if I allow this is will delay them learning English.  In my first homestay and my current home stay I have an English speaker.  One the one hand this has been helpful but on the other hand I have noticed that I have not been using Spanish as much as I should be which is making it harder to learn.  For my students I will want to make sure they are required to speak English as much as possible because I feel this will help them learn it more effectively.  This thought has definitely changed since coming on this trip.