Meet Yaylin: TESOL (M.A.'22)

I became interested in ESL education when I took Spanish 4400 (Internship or Service Learning). And so I was placed at El Sole and for the first time ever I was immersed in a bilingual environment and I thought that, like I didn't even recognize that was a place that I'd love to be in since I know Spanish.

Not only that, but I also volunteered at El Consiglio in Kalamazoo, and I helped tutor adults who are learning English. So it reminded me of my parents and it reminded me of my background and my history and my past of helping my parents or helping other English learners. No, it's English learners. Yeah. With, you know, just the English culture and language.

People should choose TESOL as their focus area because it really opens up their point of view of the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) model. And the SIOP model is not only for English learners, it can be used for any student with any background. It could even be helpful for students with academic support needs or special education needs. And just the different strategies that are used can help make sure students are on the same pace or are on the same page as their peers.

My greatest takeaway are the strategies that I'm learning in class, because even though I don't have multilingual learners, I have language learners. So my students are learning Spanish. They all know how to speak English, so my job is to teach them a whole new language. I do this through incorporating Spanish on a daily basis in all the language skills which are reading, writing, listening and speaking. And it can be really hard to do that. So with all the strategies that I'm learning and the different techniques, it really helps. It helps with promoting those language skills in my classroom, even though I don't teach English learners.

So even though I don't teach multilingual, the best part about teaching a language is seeing the progress and improvement in my students, especially when we are reading just a few sentences at a time and then it turns into reading paragraphs at a time. It is all an amazing feeling to see them be able to read.

One was called the Out of Comfort Zone Project. That one was really cool because we had to look for a place or somewhere that we normally wouldn't go to to learn about a new culture. And I chose the African-American Festival in Grand Rapids, and I learned about different foods, clothing, you know, just different culture, cultural aspects.

Another one that I want to point out was learning a new language for nine weeks. I decided to learn German for nine weeks, and our end result would be to have a conversation in the target language with a native speaker. So one of my classmates had a German cousin in Germany and I got in contact with her and I spoke a German conversation with her and it was amazing. Through that, I learned how difficult it is to learn a new language. I was lucky enough to be born in a bilingual home so I didn't have to really struggle too much just because I was young and I learned both English and Spanish, so I learned how to speak German and that was awesome.

So a couple of strategies that I've learned and that I've used with my English learners in my Spanish class is three truths and a lie. The reason I chose this one is because when we were learning the verb to lie, we were also learning different verbs like likes and dislikes. So one of my activities was you had to write down three truths and one lie in Spanish, and your partner had to guess which one was the lie.

Another one was the read aloud. Like I mentioned earlier, the read aloud was incredible to see my students understand more than just two sentences at a time. We read paragraphs about different people's profiles, what they liked, what they didn't like, who they were, where they're from.

I would recommend this program to other teachers because having multilingual students in a classroom is becoming more common and I think general education teachers should know how to accommodate those students that need extra support.

I think other undergrad teachers should pursue TESOL because it helps with understanding your students, and it helps by teaching them different strategies and techniques that can help them. You know, understand the subject more by bringing in prior knowledge, by making sure they're comprehending what you're saying.