Influence of Language on Learning

The speaker, Sarah Smith, discusses the influence of language on learning. She mentions different components of language such as communication, speech, reading, and writing. She emphasizes the importance of supporting students who may struggle with language by providing visual aids and vocabulary immersion. Sarah also highlights the need for educators to reflect on their lessons and determine if a student's difficulty is due to planning or a genuine struggle. She mentions a TED Talk by Deb Roy, who studied how his son acquired language through social interactions in their home. Sarah also discusses a recent language teaching study that explores the impact of colonialism and racism on language education. She emphasizes the need for educators to be aware of and reflect on how race intersects with language teaching. Sarah concludes by quoting the study, emphasizing that how language is conceptualized shapes what and how we teach, and that it is important to consider the potential of langu Hi, my name is Sarah Smith, and this is my first podcast. I'm an educator in a first-grade classroom, and I'm currently a student pursuing my master's at National Lewis University. I am in a Lenses on Literacy class, and this week, we took a deep dive into the influence of language on learning. I got to read an article by Sandra Levay, and she really broke down the different components on language and learning. She talked about the different categories that we need to take into consideration in our classrooms when helping students, the first component being that communication piece, how are we exchanging info, also speech, our verbal pronunciation of words, as well as, of course, that reading and writing component, understanding letter sounds and being able to write them down to communicate ideas. We also need to think about language being socially shared code. Different environments affect language and how we are expressing our thoughts. Sometimes students can't find a word in English from their home language, so it's really up to us to make sure that we need to help them with that expressive component to this by supporting our students with visuals, turn talks, being able to draw if need be, making sure that we're giving that vocab immersion, and really supporting all these aspects for that social communication. I also wrote down, I like this part about this executive part of language, where we need to think of, as educators, this planning versus difficulty. So being reflective after a lesson when we see that a student was struggling is going to always be most beneficial for their growth. So really taking a look at, wasn't our planning, was there something that we could have done differently or is the student truly having difficulty? In order to get there, us as educators, we need to make these observations of language. And we need to figure out, is there a behavior behind the language? Or does the student need support in another specific area? Different things to always take into consideration, is there another language at home? Could it be cognitive? Does the student have difficulty with certain phonemes or phonemic pronunciations? Will it relate back to speech? Really identifying all this important info is going to best support our classrooms. I really enjoyed the TED Talk. It was by Deb Roy. He did years of work to figure out how his son acquired language. He actually had cameras set up in all areas of his house, filming eight hours a day. And he really wanted to figure out what the social impacts on language acquisition were. And specifically how his son was acquiring language and how behavior as well as speech and visual cues in his home helped his son to get there. In specific, you can find this video on YouTube. His name is Deb Roy. But something really that stood out to me was that there was this word, water, that his son learned. And he figured out that most of the time that that word was relayed or communicated was when his son needed water. So they were actually mostly in the kitchen or in the bathroom when that word, water, which of course makes sense, but it's just things that we don't think about daily on how our environment is really affecting us to communicate. And it kind of made me think about that theory that there's an association with language acquisition. The last thing that I got into a deep dive of was this recent language teaching by Carrie Von Atsch, Sumanthani Matha, and Ryoku Kubata. And it really talks about how language teaching and learner's lives are shaped by this global history of racist practices as well as colonial expansion. They really wanted to make sure that there was this exploration of race to figure out how colonialism has impacted our everyday practices as educators. First, to understand that they talked about these five main things that we need to understand about race and that race cannot be separate from what it was invented. And that is that colonialism. Also that race is something that is socially and not biologically constructed. They also talked about how that there is this ongoing change around racial groups and it's always something that's fluid. Also, they mentioned about race being the social construct affecting different groups of people in different environments. But we need to think about that it's not a separate construct. We have to think about race intersecting with other attributes such as gender and sexuality. And then finally, this idea that race is embedded in the practices of language teaching and that we should be reflective of it. Something that I really wanted to quote before my podcast is over is that this was also from that race and language case study. It says, how languages conceptualize shapes how and what we teach in relation to language curriculum and how language learning students are perceived. Who gets to define what counts as language ultimately shapes the potential of those learning it. So that's just something to think about when being reflective of your own practices. I hope you learned a little bit more about language acquisition. And that's it for my first podcast. I hope you enjoyed listening. Thanks.