Week 1: My reflections about the week's readings

The reading for this week covers the different theories of 1st and 2nd language development from different schools. Each school has its particular insights. Back to my language experience, my 1st language (Mandarin Chinese with a dialect called Min or Hokkien) is acquired more naturally, and my second language is learned through a conscious. As we learned English at school, the approach of English study is exactly same as the approach to other school subjects. First, teachers usually went through word bank listed on the side of books and identified or explained each word in Mandarin. And then after reading a paragraph to us, they broke a sentence into many component parts of grammar and taught each part. Afterwards, we several times did drills and exercises to practice English. In addition, we didn’t speak oftentimes, so teacher didn’t have chance to correct our oral speech. As I read the reading for this week, I feel my learning of English reading is more like the word recognition view mentioned in chapter two. Till coming to the states, I took ESL 202 classroom as I was enrolling at MSU. In fact, ESL 202 was a writing class. In class, we could choose a topic to write, and wrote drafts. After getting feedback from the instructor, we did a final editing. Sometimes we also had peers review. Then shared the finished piece with others by presentation. I tend to think that the instructor adopted the approach more from the acquisition view in process writing classroom.