Dr. Melvin Clark, Educator and Motivator. An Interview. (2)

(Continued from previous entry)

4. Your main experience is working with young adults. What problems have you found that are common to all? Is there any specific feature that is equally troublesome to most of your students? What recommendations would you give students who are struggling in similar ways?

My students are Hispanic (all from Mexican descent). Their interlingual errors are easy to detect and are fairly common (/t/ for /th/ and /sh/ instead of /ch/ etc). They have a difficult time distinguishing all of the “there’s” in English. But most of all, they have to modify their own circular Hispanic reasoning and logic in order to learn the Subj+Verb+Object, A+B+C, etc., i.e., linear logic. They tend to spin off and “circulate” their ideas, causing interference errors which ultimately cause their ideas and writing to end up as unintelligible and at best, confusing. While this is understandable at university level, in “real world” and business applications, this is totally unacceptable! Therefore, I have isolated 35 Writing Rules which were first presented at Oxford University the summer of 2002 and published in the autumn of 2006. These rules isolate common interference errors as well as commonly made L1 errors such as using “There” as a subject of a sentence (Rule and using contractions in formal writing (Rule 6). 
5. There are many young people out there who would like to become teachers, but are somewhat hesitant. What would you tell them so they can have a clear picture of what to expect and what not?

Becoming an educator is a glorious aspiration. One will not only earn a decent salary, one will make a positive impact upon society. With Paolo Freire and Frank Laubach as two of my favorite educator heroes, I can clearly state that literacy is my objective for all that I teach. What better gift to the world? Freire fought for and taught literacy for all, regardless of position or status, in Latin America. Laubach created simple, clear phonics for many languages as a first step to literacy. I want to do the same for North America and if I could, the whole world! In summary, I like helping people. Teaching is a way to this end. And in the end, literacy achieves peace, the ultimate hope of all humankind.