This week we met our tutees. For the next 6 weeks I will be tutoring Sandra and Je-Won in English. I’m very excited to improve my teachings skills and learn from my experiences with them. I also imagine that I will learn from Sandra and Je-Won as individuals since they come from very different cultural backgrounds and have different nationalities than me. My first sessions with them start next week, I wonder how their proficiency levels will differ and how I will account for that.
A structural issue I’ve noticed in the English as a Second Language community is that a lot of students have been studying grammar for years but have not improved in proficiency. That says a lot about the quality of language education in the U.S, specifically English language education. This is an important issue for the large populations of individuals who immigrate here. If these people have limited access to a quality education for the predominant language of the country they’re moving to, their quality of life decreases immensely. In my TEFL program I’m learning ways to combat this and prioritize language acquisition in students rather than language learning.
The subject I want to base my capstone project on is Linguistic Privilege. During these next few weeks, I would like to use the experience and knowledge I gain to learn more about the impact of linguistic privilege in immigrant communities. Because I will be interacting with English second-language learners from international communities in Tallahassee during this experience, it is the optimal setting to observe and inquire the adversities this community faces due to being non-native English speakers. I want to learn a lot about teaching English to international communities and hope to one day be an English instructor teaching abroad. I also want to use this experience as a foundation for my future research and inquiry into linguistic privilege.
HSF House Blogs 