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Emily Savage

ELL Student Interview

2/25/2019

Project 2: “Needs Analysis” Fieldwork and Report

The ELL I’ve decided to interview is named Youssef Tantawy. I interviewed Youssef at

the beginning of February at his house here in Pullman. He was born in Egypt and moved to the

United States in 2006 and is now 20 years old. He has lived in California until moving here to

Washington to attend WSU. He mentioned that his cultural background is “Egyptian”. His

mother tongue is Arabic and it took him about a year and a half to learn English.

Youssef is a long-term ELL (Gottlieb, M). He has been going to school in the U.S. for

most of his life and he speaks fluent english now. When you talk to him he speaks clear English

with no accent and it’s very easy to understand him. He mentioned that one of the classes he’s

very good at is “biology” and he enjoys it a lot. He is studying to become a veterinarian. He

hopes to move back to California after college and start his career there.

I learned that when you are conducting an interview you may not need to use all the

questions you put down before. Some of mine that I asked were similar to each other so I

decided to take those out. Youssef had no problems answering the questions but I was able to

learn about all the problems he had here growing up. He mentioned how he would get angry

when no one could understand him and he would just get sent to the principal's office. “They

didn’t know what to do with me. I solved my problems by seeing how other people solved their

problems and copying them” he had to compare himself to the children around him and learn to

follow their actions. He was able to recognize his problem and then solve it. He has lived in the
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U.S. for 13 years now and his attitude towards living here is much better, he mentioned how

“Making friends is a lot easier, I’m really glad I got to move to Washington, when I moved to

California when I was younger I didn’t know anyone but now that I’m older and in a new place

making friends is no problem for me”. I also learned that it isn't easy for ELLs to come to a new

place not knowing anyone or even the language. All ELLs will run into problems but the

problems are what help them learn more.

The questions I used were useful to me because I was able to gather a lot of information

from my ELL. There were some questions that I had to add a little more detail in order to get a

little more information. If I was to do it again, I would change some of the questions because at

one part I asked “Was it ever difficult for you to learn English?” and all he said was “Yes” so I

want to try and steer clear of those yes and no answers. Having the categories (problem, solution,

attitude…) helped me learn more about my ELL and how he overcame his problems (Brown,

J.D). Since my ELL and I are very close friends it wasn't uncomfortable for either of us during

the interview.

References
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Gottlieb, M. (2016). Assessing English language learners: Bridges to educational equity:

Connecting academic language proficiency to student achievement. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin.

Brown, J.D. (1995). Chapter two: Needs analysis. In The elements of language curriculum: A
systematic approach to program development. New York, NY: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.