Sue Schneider, an ESL teacher at New York City College of Technology, adapted an activity from the Healthcare CareerKit on A Day in the Life of an EMT for her intermediate level ESL class.

She starts with a visual literacy activity, with students analyzing images of EMTs at work. As students learn about the work of EMTs through images, teachers can layer on a vocabulary activity, highlighting terms specific to the healthcare industry we well as general terms drawn from the images. They can use adjectives to describe the EMTs and the scene, including the equipment, vehicle and setting. They can practice the present continuous tense, for example, as they describe what the EMTs are doing.

To make the reading the right level for her students, Sue modified it by:

1. Taking out some sentences that added character, but were not necessary to fully understand the piece.
2. Replacing some of the more complex vocabulary with more common terms, and defining some words and expressions.
3. Adding photos to illustrate the story and provide more space and visual breaks between blocks of text.

The enhanced, lower-level reading includes terms defined in parenthesis and lots of pictures, creating natural chunks of text, pauses and visual context clues.

She added a google image search vocabulary activity. Students learn some of the tougher vocabulary in the reading by entering the terms into google as keyword searches, then placing the images alongside the vocabulary term creating their own visual glossary.

Access the visual literacy, google image vocabulary and EMT reading modified for ESL here.

How are you adapting CareerKit activities? Write to ellen.baxt@cuny.edu to share your adaptations.