alexis chin

Alexis Chin, class of 2018, is a German and Business Administration - Finance major with a minor in General English.  Her passion for language learning and interest in grammar inspired her to help other people to learn foreign languages.  She noticed others’ different methodologies and thought processes for learning a foreign language in her role as a German peer tutor at Millersville University and her experiences helping others with English during her semester abroad in Marburg, Germany.  These experiences drove her to learn more about the different approaches to language learning and others’ use of the grammar rules.  These experiences also served as her inspiration for a project about grammar in second language acquisition.  Her study involved administering a pretest and a posttest to the students in an intermediate-level German class.  A comparison of the pretest and posttest results measured the improvements in the students’ abilities to use the grammar correctly in context.  The posttest investigated the connections between the students’ grammar knowledge and language production abilities.  Through this study, she achieved her goal of learning more about the helpfulness of the grammar rules and classroom instruction in the acquisition of a foreign language.  She intends to apply the knowledge gained from this study next year in her position as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Germany, where she will help students to learn English and serve as a linguistic role model and ambassador of American culture.