Team

Ling-LingWard Melville HS, NY, United States

CaraWard Melville HS, NY, United States

KevinWard Melville HS, NY, United States

WarrenWard Melville HS, NY, United States

Age Range

19 & under

Coaches

Christopher MurphyWARD MELVILLE SHS, NY, United States

Category

Social Sciences & Culture > Languages & Language Arts

Audience

Ages 9 and up

Language

English

Team Collaboration

Our team worked well together. Tasks were delegated based on each member’s strengths, and helped was given to each other if needed. One member has studied computer languages and programming was mostly in charge of website design, while the rest of the team focused on research, and writing the actual content. Each of the other three team members was given a broad topic, stages of language acquisition, theories of language, and the effect of motivation and ability. After the initial phase of research and basic design layout, we all came together to edit the website and perfect it. Even though it was easy to divide up the tasks, the actual process was not easy. Some of the topics aren’t as straightforward or easy to find so writing about some topics such as the social effects of second language acquisition required us to work together to research the information by separately finding small sections of information from various sources and putting it together. In the process of putting the actual website together we also discovered some difficulties. Sometimes the code was not in the proper form, and besides Ling Ling, the rest of the group had to learn the basics of code, and how to properly use the web-site making software. Our computer person was able to teach us a lot though, and was able to fix up any problems we encountered.

Team Diversity

The team is highly diverse, and contributed greatly to the creation of our website. The topic of our website, Second Language Acquisition, was inspired by our diverse team. Two members are Chinese, one is Taiwanese, and the last is a mix of Italian, Swedish, and German. Our Chinese and Taiwanese members all grew up learning Mandarin, and all high school students have to learn or attempt to learn a foreign language; so second language acquisition was a topic of interest to our group. Since much of our team has grown up learning a second language, our background and culture were able to help us make our website by allowing us to relate to the information we studied. Our computer person is also especially interested in Japanese and Russian language and has studied those languages in her free time. All of us try to learn our high school language courses the best we can, and besides being informational, we tried to show our belief of how useful and interesting second languages can be.