Influence on Academic Performance

When talking about the several factors that may influence our English Language Learners' academic performance we can think on a large amount of them. In Freeman & Freeman's book (2001), through a series of case studies, we can appreciate a great variety of factors that may influence academic performance upon English Learners either inside a school environment or outside of the school. It is very important to have an exhautive knowledge of several case studies in order to get a right understanding of the research and theories about second language acquisiton and culture, taking that knowledge into account will help us in our future lessons when teaching.

Detailed Description of Students:

School: Liceo “José Tomás de Urmeneta García”

“This is a public secondary school which imparts technical education at middle level. Most of the students who come here come from a middle or low socioeconomic status. In what concerns to the their descent, inspite some of the students' last names are indigenous, nobody has declared to be one, so there is no evidence of indigenous descent. The school has more than a thousand students which attends specialized classes, classes are of 40 to 45 students. There is not immigrants in the school. The level of motivation is very low, principally because there is no chances of better resourses in the school for us to give to ours students. Besides, teachers are aldo dismotivated because students misbehave and do not want to success.

The relationship among parents, school, and students is very little, almost nothing. Most of them come from families in which parents are separated and so they do not have enough time to come to the school to see and know how are doing their children at school.

My Good Language Learner

My good student is called David. He is a very organised boy, although he does not come from a very good family (because his older brother was in prision, and his father does not have a fulltime job) he is a very smart guy. He is very engaged with what happens in classes, and he ask everytime he does not understand anything, he puts all his efforts in trying to understand the language, that is why he has succeded in that way. Besides, his mother is always giving him all the support he needs to get a good self-steem.