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Julio was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and grew up speaking only Spanish. He lived there with his family until 8th grade. Him and his family then moved to the United States as he was entering high school.

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Julio grew up speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish only. When he came to the United States, it was very difficult to focus in school, especially in his English classes. He felt isolated not being able to speak his home language regularly.

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Julio moved to the United States, and needed to learn English in his public high school. His biggest motivation was wanting to communicate with people, make friends, and be able to participate in class.

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Julio found learning English to be difficult as all he knew his whole life was Spanish. He found English class specifically to be hard, as there were a lot of complex and big words he could not understand.

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Julio's advice for teachers is to be patient and be motivating. No student cares about English when they have a lot of problems at home, or within their family. It is important for teachers to be supportive outside the curriculum. Students do not care about how much you know, until they know how much you care.

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Julio's benefits of knowing both Spanish and English is being able to support others, and have a larger impact. Julio has studied abroad before and plans on going back to Columbia this spring. He says it opens his world to new opportunities and connections that will help his path to becoming a high school Spanish teacher.

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In speaking with my coworker, Julio, I recognized many similarities to our course content and with my observation hours. Julio’s story of being from a different country reminds me of a student I just observed last week at Braintree Public Schools, who was from Venezuela. The student very similar to Julio’s situation in school was brand new to United States and was only fluent in Spanish. Both of them would have been level 1 in proficiency as they have/had no English proficiency.

In Julio’s case he touched on a crucial language learner factor of motivation. He mentioned how motivated he was in learning the language because he wanted more connections. He also stressed the importance of support given by the teacher, because of possible family issues. This is another language learner factor mentioned in our book.

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Julio’s point of teachers needing to make it known how much they care to ELL students’ relates to the Humanistic Learning Theory. It falls in line with that theory, as the well-being of the student is a central focus. Julio’s point of view allowed me to see the importance of the social-emotional connection between the student and teacher, and how that ultimately impacts growth for an ELL student.

Julio did not mention this directly in his interview, but I also thought he would have benefited greatly from a newcomer program, if hewas not in one. He was new to the country and had no background in the English language. The program would have met his needs directly.

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Echevarria, Jana, and Ann Graves. “Theoretical and Historical Foundations.” Sheltered Content Instruction Teaching English Language Learners with Diverse Abilities, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2015, pp. 31–48.