Below is a video of me reading a speech written by my student, Andrea.
The title for the speech is "The World That I Dream Of." She wrote the speech entirely. I made some substantial corrections to grammar and a few tweaks to vocabulary choices, but I added not a single sentence or idea, nor were her her original grammar or word choices anywhere so poor that I was unable to grasp her intended meaning (conceding that I have many years of familiarity with what you might call Korean rhetorical norms being awkwardly translated into English via a cellphone dictionary, where every sentence starts with "Then," "So," or "And").
I handed her my camera and I am reading her speech for her because she is going to be entering a speaking contest, and she struggles some with English intonation. I thought that by giving her an example of a native speaker's intonation on her words, she could practice and improve her own.
As I read the speech, I became aware that it's really a pretty remarkable bit of rhetoric, for a 6th grader. I wasn't close to producing this level of social thought at that age, much less in a foreign language. I think Andrea has a future as some kind of preacher or inspirational speaker (e.g. a TED-talker).
[daily log (11 pm): walking, 5 km]
Comments