Blog Entry #2: Interview with Genesis Amador

After interviewing my friend Genesis, I found that her story was very similar to other former English Language Learners in my life. Genesis was born in the United States to two Honduran parents who spoke only Spanish to her when she was a very young child. When she was in kindergarten, she was enrolled in a bilingual class and moved to a general education class in first-grade. She would be a part of the ESL program from then on to fourth-grade. When I asked her if she thought the age at which she started learning English affected her fluency, she said that because she started learning English at such an early age, she was able to achieve the native speaker level of proficiency she has now. The Critical Period Hypothesis would agree that language learner at a young age reaps many benefits. According to Wright (2010), younger students tend to receive “a much greater amount of instructional time in K-12 educational systems” to learn a language than adults learning a new language and tend to “feel more comfortable using their new language” (p. 37). However, I also found it interesting that her parents encouraged her and pushed her to learn English at a young age, despite not being fluent themselves. It is probably because they saw the need to speak English well in order to survive in the United States and therefore, had high expectations for their children. “Young-school age children often have greater motivation, pressure, needs, and opportunities to develop second language proficiency than adults” (Wright, 2010, p. 37). Genesis mentioned that her parents often read books to her and her siblings as children and was able to practice and use her English with her peers in school. It is not surprising that her fluency is that of a native-speaker in the present.