Link to my video: https://youtu.be/XtrWewSE3Lw
I interviewed my boyfriend's mother Herminia Bello who was born and raised in Sonora, Mexico. She did not come to the United States or begin to learn English until she was 13 years old. Mrs. Bello mentions one of the biggest struggles she had while learning English, and something she still struggles with now, is the phonology and pronunciation of the English words. "Ironically, then, foreign accents may arise‘ not because one has lost the ability to learn to pronounce, but because one has learned to pronounce the L1 so well" (Ortega, 2013, p. 23). While trying to pronounce words in English Mrs. Bello has a very strong accent that is very detectable in the vblog video. I think this is because she spoke only Spanish for 13 years before being introduced to English so she really knows "Spanish so well" after all of those years, as Ortega mentioned in the quote above. To prove this theory Ortega also mentions, "we have said that there is clear evidence that accents are likely to develop when the L2 is first learned later in life" (Ortega, 2013, p. 23).
Something that helped Herminia be successful in learning a new language as an adolescent, in a new country, away from her family were her teachers and peers. Herminia says that her peers included her in all of the activities they participated in. She said she would just listen to them speak orally to discover new vocabulary words and meaning to words in the English Language. " Learners obtain comprehensible input mostly through listening to oral messages that interlocutors direct to them and via reading written texts that surround them, such as street signs, personal letters, books and so on" (Ortega, 2013, p. 59). As Ortega mentioned in the quote above Herminia obtained comprehensible input through listening to her teachers and peers.
Herminia story inspired me to keep trying and to have perseverance while trying to learn a new language myself. She came to the United States all by herself to live with an American family who took her in as an exchange student and attended all regular classes in high school without knowing one word in English and succeeded at learning the language fluently in just 1 short year. She was a very motivating person to chose for my interview.
Ortega, Lourdes. Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
