Reflection
For this entry video, I decided to interview one of my coworkers. Me and Ozzy have been working together for a few months or so now, and I have always had conversations with him. Although we speak often, being that we work together, I felt like after this experience I learned so much more about Ozzy and his background. All of which I did not know before this experience. I thought getting to interview him and getting to know about him and his experiences with learning English was awesome and interesting. One of the things Ozzy mentioned in his interview is how learning English from such a young age really beneficial in this journey to another language. He mentioned that if he had to learn English now it might not have been as easy as it was then. Ortega says “…learners who began acquiring the L2 before a certain age, which these studies locate to be around puberty, will tend to exhibit intuitions that are very close to those of native speakers of that language” (pg. 19,2013). Ozzy also spoke about how learning English was not very hard because he mostly heard English in the classroom and also the Spanish language and the English language are similar in many ways. Ortega states that “knowledge of the L1 can often have a positive impact on the rate of L2 learning” (pg. 42, 2013). Because he already knew his L1 language and it has similarities to his L2 language, Ozzy was able to pick up the language fairly quick. All in all, this interview helped me to see how difficult or easy learning a new language can be for some people. I felt like I understood more how SLA works by hearing Ozzy’s journey into learning his L2 language, and it also helped me to get to know him more.
