My first language teaching experience was an unexpected one. It was my first year working as a tutor, which was a little over a decade ago, I was tasked to provide guidance and teach school-aged children lessons covered in their respective schools. One of the subjects I had to teach was Filipino (Tagalog). This subject entailed helping students develop their Tagalog proficiency across all skills which included: speaking, listening, writing, and reading. I was confident it was going to be an easy task, but I was completely surprised when I met my students, who all came from different language backgrounds. One of my students was a 7-year old Filipino who was proficient in Tagalog and English. She used both languages at home, but used Tagalog more often. My other student was a 5-year old Filipino-Chinese who was fluent in English and a novice learner in both Tagalog and Mandarin. His parents were fluent in all three languages but mostly communicated with him in English. Another student was a 9-year old Korean who recently moved to the Philippines, and she was fluent in English and Korean. Her school had Filipino and Mandarin classes so she was starting to learn both. It was not long before I realized that despite teaching the same subject, each had different language learning needs. My Filipino-Chinese student’s parents were more involved in the learning process, and I felt how important it was for them for their child to develop proficiency in the language. My Korean student seemed less motivated and simply wanted to learn to pass the subject. Given all their differences, I had to quickly adapt and change my strategies to best support them. It was clear that there was no cookie-cutter approach because there were a multitude of factors that affected how my students learned. During my time in the LTS Program, I worked on exploring these contextual factors to help me have a clearer sense of my learners and what I needed to consider when teaching languages.

In my Comparative Context Analysis Paper written for the course Language Learning in Context (LT534), I compared two language learning contexts close to my heart: home language learning and language immersion schools. I focus specifically on heritage language learners, that is, learners who are learning a language spoken by household members but is not the dominant language used in the learner’s speech community. With heritage language, learners’ motivation to learn is driven by their strong cultural connection with the language. Not only does it give them a deeper sense of identity, but it enables them to establish a stronger relationship with their families. In my paper, I talk about how heritage language learners’ experiences vary greatly depending on the amount and quality of the input available and opportunities to use the language. It exemplifies one of the theories of second language acquisition - the Cognitive Interactionist Approach - which posits that language learners need exposure to the language in order to give them the opportunity to interpret and negotiate for meaning, produce the language, and ultimately, enable them to learn (Gass & Mackey, 2006). One of the key findings in my research is how stakeholders play an important role in heritage language learners’ amount and quality of the input. Families can choose to exclusively use a minority language at home, while school administrators and policymakers can decide which languages can be offered in school. 

In my paper for the course Design for Language Learning (LT535) titled “It Takes a Village to Raise a Bilingual Child: Immersion Parents’ Challenges and Roles in Supporting Their Children’s Second Language Learning,” I dig deeper into one of the stakeholders of young language learners: the parents. I explored the challenges that immersion parents and caregivers encounter and the ways in which educators can help families support the language learning of their children. One key takeaway from this paper is that parents and caregivers have varying views on how their language proficiency in the target language can have an impact on their children’s language development. For some parents, lack of proficiency is seen as an advantage because they can learn alongside their children. Others view it as a detriment because it isolates them from the learning process. They do not know how to support their children, and can not openly communicate with teachers and actively participate in school activities. For parents who are native speakers, motivations are driven by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Parents who are intrinsically motivated aspire to use language learning as a way for their children to have stronger connections to their cultural backgrounds. But some have more practical reasons like gaining additional skills to increase their chances of securing better jobs in the future, which is more characterized as extrinsic motivation. Brown and Lee (2015) suggest striking a right balance of these two types of motivations is ideal, and leads to more positive consequences for the students.

Since my students came from different grade levels, I observed how each student had their own strengths and weaknesses. Younger students were more confident than older students when it came to speaking because they were not worried about making mistakes. It was more challenging, however, to teach them reading skills because they were simultaneously developing their reading abilities in their first language. It was not clear to me how exactly to teach languages to different ages. There were even moments when I wondered if teaching a new language to young learners made sense at all. What made it even more challenging were the opposing views I often heard or read about children learning multiple languages. Having this dilemma, I went on to investigate and create a presentation for the course Second Language Acquisiton (LING544) titled “What is the Best Age for Children to Learn a Language?.” In this presentation, I zoom in on three different stages of childhood from babies and toddlers, preschoolers, and school-aged children. I explored common myths and looked at what research says about the age of onset of second language acquisition. While it is true that there is a so-called “critical age” or “optimal period” in language learning, several factors come into play with second language acquisition (Hoff, 2009). Some of these factors include children’s background knowledge of the first language, exposure to the target language in school, and children’s physical ability to process languages. It cannot be assumed that children are better second language learners. They can be but what is important is the quantity and quality of input they receive, and how they decide to use it in their daily lives. 

Clearly, context matters. And this goes beyond the contextual factors related to language teaching because learners also need to be able to understand the context wherein they are using the target language so that they are able to successfully communicate their intended meaning. This refers to the fourth language component: pragmatics. This is often overlooked in language classrooms but is equally as important as phonology, morphology, and syntax. With communication being a two-way process, language learners need to be able to adjust their language based on three contextual factors, also known as the three dimensions of pragmatics, namely power, social distance, and rank of imposition. To advocate the importance of pragmatics, I created a website* for the course Design for Language Learning Pragmatics (LT507), that features a curated collection of television commercials showing how terms of address are used in Tagalog. When browsing through the videos, one would learn that the word “kuya,” which literally translates to older brother, can be used in a variety of ways. “Kuya” can be used to address a store attendant especially when complaining to soften the severity of the situation. It can also be used as a sign of respect to a close friend or even a colleague. My curation project also include English terms like “Bro”, “Mommy”, and “Miss/Mister.” With most Filipinos speaking at least two languages, I write about how translanguaging or mixing languages is common practice and learners need to know how and when these are used so they can make the right choices when using the language. Oftentimes, it sounds unnatural to use Tagalog completely in a sentence, so if learners intend to develop Tagalog conversation skills, they need to be able to develop the ability to mix languages depending on who and where they are talking to. While it is a challenging area of linguistics to teach, it can be done. The website features a sample lesson plan/activity that uses the collection to help students develop the ability to use terms of address appropriately. It follows the IPIC framework (AELRC, 2020) which guides educators on how to develop pragmatic competence of learners. Through the IPIC framework, students are able to demonstrate knowledge about vocabulary and grammar, analyze and decode appropriate language based on context, articulate why they chose such language, and recognize whether they made the right choice and modify their language as needed.

*The artifact presented includes the curated list with annotations for the project. The platform used for the website, unfortunately, can no longer be accessed.