Reflection
For this assignment, I have chosen to conduct my interview with my mother, Angelita Lopez. She was born in a dual-language household consisting of both Spanish and English speakers. Her father made sure that she was learning English so she will be able to do well in school, unlike her older brother who failed Kindergarten because he knew very little English.
My initial thoughts on my mother’s first language were that it was going to be Spanish. However, I have found out during the span of this interview that instead she grew up speaking both English and Spanish as a first language. From what I learned in her household, she spoke English to her father and Spanish to her mother. My mother would be considered simultaneous multilingual because she began speaking both languages since birth. Rowland (2014), mentions that “Many of these children are from migrant families who have settled in a country where most people speak a different language” (p. 175). My mother’s father was a naturalized citizen while her mother was from Monterrey, Mexico which would make sense as to why she spoke English mostly to her father and Spanish to her mother. Rowland (2014), even touched onto this phenomenon by stating that, “sometimes, both languages are provided by the parents, so the child will be exposed to both languages in the home in roughly equal proportions” (Rowland, 2014, p.175). This would mean that my mother grew up to be bilingual.
According to Ortega (2013), my mother was bilingual in which she was able to, “switch and alternate between two (or more) languages, depending on a range of communicative needs and desires” (p. 4). Moreover, she mentioned that at her workplace she has the ability to switch languages when her patients feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish rather than in English. I have found that she has no difficulty in switching her languages and that she has not faced any imminent struggles to where she would mix the two languages together unintentionally. Whenever she speaks to my siblings and I at home she ends up switching between Spanish and English words with ease. I imagine her doing this at her hospital as well with the babies’ parents.
My mother is a mixture of both naturalistic and instructed learner because she learned both languages through her parents and from studying Spanish I and II in High School. She learned naturalistically through verbally speaking Spanish and not writing it until much later once she began studying the language later in High School (Ortega, 2013, p. 6). Because she already had an aforementioned background of Spanish knowledge, she was able to pair her verbal Spanish vocabulary she knew along with the writing portion with little to no difficulty.
All things considered, compared to how much Spanish and English she knows now she said her proficiency in English would be fluent and her Spanish would be at most top tier but not exemplary. I find this considerably so because my mom usually speaks English in a majority of conversations than in Spanish. I learned so much more about my mother during this interview and am surprised that she ended up growing up as a dual language learner in her household. Interviewing my mother even answered some questions I had and she really knows a lot more about second language acquisition than I realized!
