STAGE 1

Today I was reading again the stages of Language Acquisition to get ready for my assignment and I remembered that last year for my sophomore field experience I had to observe an ESL class. The teacher told me that it was the first time with the students. When his class started, only Hispanic students where in the classroom; he asked them in English if any of them understood some words. The classroom was silent for a few seconds and then he repeated the same question in Spanish and everybody started talking. His first activity was a short song in which a list of much known words was present. In addition to the song he used body movement (signs) to represent each word. The very next day he asked students to sing the song and make the same signs. Many of the students made the signs but it was hard to reproduce the song especially in front of the entire class.
In this example we can se very clear in the stage these students were at the time where English is completely incomprehensible and frustration when trying to speak the language keeps students away from expressing themselves.