Blog 24-Draft

Intro

It’s funny how when you start doing something, you picture the way it will turn out. You don’t really think about the things that will go wrong, right? You usually see that thing ending in a certain way, for example, when you write a research paper. You usually get a topic, find all the research that is out there, make your  own observations by gathering data, compare the research you found with what is out there with what you have found, and then come to some sort of conclusion.  Well, when I tried this approach with my research project I never considered the things that could go wrong, and that’s exactly what happened to me; everything went wrong.  So instead of having a research project, what I have ended up with is a lesson in how to carefully plan out a research project.

Research Question/Why?       

What I did first was pick a topic. I tried to pick something that would be useful to me and relates to my career choice. Since I have been observing a kindergarten class for my junior field experience, I decided I would choose a topic about an English Language Learner (ELL) in my class. So my research question became, what kind of social interactions with native speaking students help ELL students fit-in in the classroom? This research question is one that educators, students, parents, basically everyone could benefit from. Many people from other countries who come to America are affected by this. I believe that finding out what influences ELL students socially and academically could determine how they learn. We have so many students who are ELL students and they have a difficult time adapting to the social and academic environment. They have a difficult time and transitioning into an academic environment because of their language barrier. It’s important to know the current methods we are using today, and to see if they are effective, helpful, and whether or not we need better methods? Eventually students will grow up and be effective citizens since they will be part of our community. Educators need to make sure that students will overcome those barriers. This is why this topic is important to writing research studies. What I didn’t consider is that instead of making it about just one student in the class, I could have focused on other ELL students in the classroom. In the class I was observing, there was one other ELL student. Expanding the research to more than one students would have given me more feedback and more less opportunities for things to go wrong.

The Research Out There

In looking for research to support what I was looking for, I found two articles that came close. The first article was An English-Speaking Pre-kindergarten Teacher for Young Latino Children: Implications of the Teacher-Child Relationship on Second Language Learning by Christina Gillanders. When I looked at this article I noticed that it was stressing the need for Bilingual teachers in teaching ELL students. When it came to the part of the article that would actually help me out, the findings of the data, I realized I had to purchase the article to look at it. The price was a bit much so I decided not to purchase it. It figures that the most important part of the paper that I needed was not free. So I looked at my second article, Contemporary Perspectives on Social Learning in Early Childhood Education by Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. This article is focused on the need to develop a positive relationship with the students in order to allow access for opportunities for learning English. However like the first article, when it got to the par that I would really help me out, Of course I had to pay for it and it was not cheap. I tried looking on other websites, to see if I could find the article(s) for free somewhere else. It just wasn’t happening for me. By this time, I started to get worried about my paper because I didn’t even have the research to support why I was doing my own research project. But after speaking with my professor, I realized I could gather my own data first and then find the research to support it, so that it what I decided to do.

The Interview

My last Resort