The case studies offered in this ethnography describe the learning experiences of 13 second and third grade students, six girls and seven boys, living in a medium-sizemidwestern town in the United States, who are taught Spanish as a foreign language once a week in 30 minute sessions during the 1995-6 school year. None of the children had any prior exposure to Spanish nor any additional exposure to Spanish outside the class I taught.The research investigates several areas of individual variety, including motivation, learning style, approach to vocabulary learning, classroom behavior, expectations, and listening and pronunciation skills.The study also investigates the impact of age and gender, as well as associations between the individuals' basic skills and L2 learning success.In addition, the study documents the teacher's experiences, observations, and insights during these classroom sessions. The researcher functioned as a participant-observer by teaching, recording, transcribing, and analyzing.The material for this study comes from hours of classroom teaching which were video- and audio-taped and from careful notes. The tapes and notes were transcribed and analyzed for patterns of learning behavior.A large number of observations resulted from this indepth study. One of the main findings of the study was that classroom management, emotional climate, and peer group influence are very closely interconnected. Learning was strongly related to cooperativeness and supportiveness in the two groups of girls but not seem to be so with the boys. There was no conclusive evidence that any one personality trait was more important than another in the long run. Overall scores on the CTBS were positively related to success in second language learning and were not negatively affected from one year to the next from the time taken out to study Spanish. There was no one area in the CTBS battery that could successfully predict foreign language aptitude; the best predictor seemed to be overall classroom success. Learning a foreign language was not particularly easy or automatic with this group; however, they did seem to have an aptitude and a willingness for repeating unfamiliar sounds. / Department of English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/181169 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Steves, Karen L. |
| Contributors | Ely, Christopher M. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | viii, 263 leaves : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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