American Teens Talk

In the summer of 2009, I had a wonderful opportunity to spend three weeks with a group of Tajik English teachers. One of the teachers said that her students would like to have a book of stories about American teenagers. When I returned home, I couldn’t find a book like that, so I began to interview ordinary young people about their everyday lives and send the interviews to some English teachers and learners. When I asked teenagers for an interview, they almost always said, “But I don’t do anything special.” I told them, “That’s exactly what I want: ordinary life and ordinary English.”