Скачать или смотреть Adam Walden Field Experience Video

I apologize about the sound. This is a rough (not exact) transcript of the video.

Hi, I’m Adam Walden, and the class I’ve been working in is AVID at East High. The class involves preparing students from low-income families for college, and so lessons revolve around improvement in other classes, or opportunities for scholarship and community awareness. Students in my class come from a variety of different backgrounds, and most them are in fact ELLs. However, as this is a High School setting, and none of the students are very new to the United States, most of them have grown rather accustomed to speaking in English. That said, their writing often across as cluttered and difficult to understand. One student with a Latin-American background asked me to check an essay she had wrote for a scholarship.
One sentence of this essay is,” Actions I can take to promote social justice is take an action in my community by volunteering for various kinds of organizations.”
Clearly, there are issues regarding the number of the subject, the lack of the word “to” accompanying the word “is,” which would complete the “be+to” infinitive, and the redundancy of claiming she would “take an action” and beginning the sentence by implying she would define an action in her sentence. However, I appreciate her successful attempt to use the preposition “by” correctly, as well as her ability to and I have a sense of what she is trying to communicate. This essay was for a scholarship, so I, along with the teacher, gave advice to the student regarding some of the grammar, as well to be more specific about what kind of volunteering she would like to do.
This next example comes from a Latin-American student who, during a conversation, pronounces the word “notice” in an interesting way. The student says something to the effect of “I didn’t even notice that,” except he pronounces “notice” as something like “nolt-hiss.” I am unable to replicate it the way he did. I don’t think that this requires any intervention, and I even think that slight phonetic differences like this should be celebrated rather than discouraged, especially considering that there was no way to misinterpret what he meant.
nʊlthɪs
vs
notɪs
Finally, the last example I have comes from a student of Arabic background. Students were writing about how the best learned, and she writes, “looking through and examining will make something visual then just looking for the answers.” Given my previous experience interacting with this girl, I was surprised somewhat by her grasp of vocabulary. It was difficult to get a sense of her grasp of English because she was very quiet. While her understanding of individual words was good, we worked with her to improve her use of grammar in her writing. Here, she understands how to add “ing” to verbs to make them into a noun. She misses that “than” requires a comparative, in this case, “more.” Still, in my opinion, pointing out specific little fixes is less important than ensuring that the student continues to read, write, and speak in the target language, and I am confident each student sill improve in time.