Having been an EFL elementary and middle school English teacher for about two years, my research interest is mainly geared towards my students’ difficulties while they are learning English. I discovered two major obstacles which are fluency in their spoken grammar and enormous amount of vocabulary that they need to memorize.

First, it is a really challenging job to transfer grammar knowledge into spoken language for non-native speakers.

For example,

-You have a number of students who consistently make mistakes with pronouns even though you already taught that lesson. The problem with these students is that they understand the rules perfectly on the written grammar exams, but continuously show poor usage of pronouns when they speak.

For example, they would have a conversation like…

Student 1 : I went to grocery shopping with my dad last night. She spent a lot of money on candies.

Student 2 : Wait, you said you went with your dad, right?

Students 1 : Yes, oh sorry I meant he spent a lot of money on candies. He also bought nice winter gloves for her aunt.

It could be because of a lack of speaking practice, but even when my students were given enough speaking practice, they often struggled showing the same fluency level in their spoken language as they did in their grammar exercises. So, I want to find out real causes of this problem and resolve this issue. I would hope to develop a software or a solution to increase this spoken grammar fluency level as nearly as grammar fluency level.

Next, students also need to memorize numerous words. Whenever I come to class, they seem to be literally overwhelmed by all these words. There should be some useful software that can help them such as flash card software that I learned from Engl 510, but I believe that we need more direct and practical help for them. It would be really great if we could make courses specifically for vocabularies targeting on ESL and EFL students. In these courses, we could include useful strategies such as ways to broaden vocabulary knowledge based on word origins, prefix, suffix, and compound words for students to drastically shorten their time to memorize words. We need to develop these specific tactics and lessons for them.

     I believe that we always need to search for ways and solutions to help our L2 learners no matter what research we are working on. If I can find out solutions for these two problems that most L2 learners have, it will be a great contribution in the fields of Education and Linguistics.