Service Learning Experience Summary

This paper will be a summary about the service learning experience that I had the opportunity to have throughout the course of the semester. The classes that I observed are a ninth grade English Honors class, and an eleventh grade AP English class, at Cerritos High School. Even though the students from those two classes belong to different age ranges, both groups have shown to have about the same needs, and they are both formed (for the majority) of ESL learners. The difference between the two classes was found in the curriculum goals or in the books used. Moreover, the way in which both of the class curriculums are developed is also similar, the reason for which can be found in the fact that the English Honor and AP English classes are held …show more content…
As a matter of fact, the needs of the students of the two courses are simple, they have to reach an advanced level of written English in order to use it at the best of their abilities in classroom and academic environment. For what it concerns the ninth grade class, the main goal of the curriculum is to help the students reach abilities close to a college academic level class. What this means is that even though the students are mostly ESL learners, at the end of the year they should be able to be entirely fluent in English, to use an impeccable grammar, and to know academic vocabulary and how to use it. On the other hand, the goals of the eleventh grade class curriculum concern the AP English exam that the students will have to take; as it is comprehensible by the name of the class itself. Said test is composed of a multiple choice part and a free response/composition part; hence, the goal of this class is for the students to become proficient in the AP exam tasks in order to succeed in …show more content…
The instructor decided to develop the two classes in the same way; in fact, he implemented both of them through discussions, which for the most part take place during group work among students. During the courses there is a small amount of time in which the teacher explains the class contents and texts or articles, after that the students will be usually left to work on their projects, do group work exercises or to discuss. In the English Honors class they mostly do vocabulary exercises in groups, discuss about literature pieces, read literature pieces etc.. In the AP class the students will mostly be set into groups to discuss about each other’s essays and correct them, they will read articles about current events, and work together on their preparation for the AP