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ESL Tutoring: HOW I DO
Dread Pirate Arbuthnot
OMG WRIGGLYT O X O P L A S M O S I SRegistered User regular
OMG WRIGGLYT O X O P L A S M O S I SRegistered User regular
My father is going to China for one year to teach ESL. Here in Canada, he has a student who he is teaching ESL. Since he is leaving and his student is eager to learn English, he told me that I could try taking up his lessons. I think I'm totally capable of this -- I'm gifted in English, have wanted to teach for some time, done tutoring before, etc. The problem is he's 23, drives a BMW, and he is at a weird point in his English progression.
For instance, he knows basic grammar and pronunciation, but he doesn't have a good vocabulary. My dad says that its important to teach him vocabulary and just correct grammar/pronunciation on the go. The student doesn't know things like 'asphalt', 'competition', 'rental' and so on and so forth.
Basically once I get a grip on this I'm sure I'll do well, but what's a good starting point?
For instance, he knows basic grammar and pronunciation, but he doesn't have a good vocabulary. My dad says that its important to teach him vocabulary and just correct grammar/pronunciation on the go. The student doesn't know things like 'asphalt', 'competition', 'rental' and so on and so forth.
Basically once I get a grip on this I'm sure I'll do well, but what's a good starting point?
Dread Pirate Arbuthnot on
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Light reading, not dick and jane stuff, as he is past that, obviously.
But I recommend teen adventure books like the Artemis Fowl series, and maybe even comics.
Not Penny Arcade yet, but, Calvin and Hobbes would be fun.
I wanna see their faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller
Then you'll BOTH have a great time. :"D
I wanna see their faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller
All my teaching liscence work had to do with kids, so some of my advice will be less handy.
What I still suggest, though: Use the internet. Find pictures of places, things, interests. Have him find pictures of things he's interested in, can relate to, knows about, or a place has visited. Then have him describe it, and work from their; if theres stuff in the picture he didn't talk about, make sure he knows it. If the Grand Canyon was the topic, you could talk about the Colorado river, trees, rocks, animals, activities, people there, temperature, etc. This works well with both kids and adults, because everyone likes telling a story about something they did, and an adult won't feel like they're talking about something childish (like reading a kids book and going "this is a cat. this is a dog. dogs go bark bark").
The comics suggestion is also excellent, since that gives visual cues and is usually light on extraneous text. Television with subtitles can also be useful, depending on the program. I was able to get my ear for the Spanish language watching telenovelas on Spanish speaking channels, with spanish subtitles. Soap operas (at least the spanish ones) are fantastsic, because theres so many physical cues that you sometimes don't even need to know much of the language to get what's going on. This isn't effective by itself, but as a background thing, something you do 30 min of every day it helps train the ear for "correct" patterns. Interesting linguistics/grammar fact: while most English speaking Americans speak the language fairly well, a lot of them don't even know the grammar rules they're using; they just know the pattern and do it automatically. TV (much as I hate it) can cultivate this, which makes learning the actual rules part easier.
You mentioned the BMW; the guy must do some kind of work, so you can definitely talk about that. With adults, you can use the student as a resource more so than when working with children.
Use real life examples. Street signs, prescriptions, etc. I don't know how mobile you will be, but if you are comfortable going places, its amazing how much you can learn just walking around reading signs.
Write! A key component to learning English, whether you're an ELL or a native speaker. Have him write about anything. Depending on his personality, he might try not to use words he doesn't know or avoid describing things he doesn't have a translation for; if you notice this in any writing, give him a little push, help him figure out the English bits and go back in again. It's easy to forget that even though someone is officially "illiterate," they're usually fully literate in their own language, and some people are really good writers. Encourage this if any kind of motivation is there.
Other than that, use the best resource you can EVER find on how to deal with a student: that student's former teachers. I would expect you don't want to rely on him too much, and I agree, and feel you'd do fine, but if there are things your father found particularly effective and useful add it to your teaching toolbox and go from there.
This is all a bit disjointed, but it's late and I'm trying to think of good general advice without knowing anything about the student or the situation. This should get you started, though, and it sounds like you're motivated more than enough to make it work no matter what.
Good luck!
No. My dad asked me to take over on Saturday night and he just left this morning. He's leaving on short notice.
These are some really good ideas.
I was thinking about using the Wii and Wii Sports to start a dialogue going about the physical actions and objects in the game, but not sure if that's a good idea or not.
BBC can be a good place to go to find random articles to read, they also have their regional & foreign language sections. I try to keep up some of my language skills by checking out those areas myself.
I'm working in a high school French classroom right now and an elementary ELL classroom (neither of which are exactly what you need, but I hope I have some good ideas), and today in French the teacher had them associate the objects, like Threelemmings was suggesting.
Maybe take a walk or a drive and try and name as many object or activity you can. For example, if you're in the park, point out trees (all types: oak, willow, etc.), bushes, sidewalk, leaves, lake, rollerblades, rollerblader, short shorts, helmet, bicycle/bike, leash, kid leash, stroller, twins, mother, jogging, sunglasses, ponytail, sportsbra (he might like that one), bench, billboard, mayor (we have ads on our benches), and so forth. If those are too rudimentary, perhaps a more urban environment would be more useful, like a subway stop, or a bench on the street, or even a department store!
Also: what if you tried using poems or riddles? Probably not "Jabberwocky," but a lot of kids poems have lots of good, direct vocab in them, or more adult poems will still use more advanced vocabulary that will still be useful. Limericks are good because you really have to search to find words that fit, and they're really fun to say; riddles as well can be very fun (for example, my mom always used to get some of those poppers for christmas and the prizes inside would also come with riddles in French, and it was challenging but fun to figure out what exactly they were saying [and then to see what didn't really translate very well]).
Speaking of things that don't translate well: maybe have a day of idioms? For example, my French teacher mentioned today about her Econ professor in college who would tell them to "Keep ahold of your horse!" (hold yer horses) Also, even though I'm a native English speaker, I get "Well, if you're going to twist my arm..." and "You're pulling my leg!" mixed up ("Well, if you're going to twist my leg...wait...")(durr). They make language more interesting and can make speaking a second language more natural for the speaker and the listener.
More edit: The suggestion of pictures is a good one. Does he have any photos from home or of his friends, etc.? That might be good to point out everything in there. Like, in all my language classrooms (ELL, French, Japanese) we never learned how to say "wireless router" or "tampon" or "humidifier," "paper lantern," "potted plant," or any other number of things.
To add to what I mentioned above, assuming you can go places, go to stores: grocery stores are fantastic for food and learning some of the customer service stuff- credit cards, receipts, how to talk to people when you are paying them for stuff. A home improvement stores is another fantastic one, as you can see all the parts of a house and yard and learn the terms, as well as the names of things to put them together. As an example, a light switch is held in by screws which you put in using a screwdriver which comes in a toolbox. Important words (depending on what you do) but ones you wouldn't often learn.
The idioms advice is also very important; most other things in any language can be worked out by someone using other words or just by learning more vocabulary, but idioms don't make semantic sense and thus usually need someone else to explain what the heck they mean.
Reading poems is an excellent suggestion as well. And I disagree a bit on Jabberwocky. While it doesn't help with actual vocabulary (your main focus), once you get far enough with grammar, Jabberwocky is a fantastic example of how you can know what a word refers to in context of a conversation because you know the patterns of the english language.
for example:
We know that toves is a noun, it is slithy (an adjective), and it gyres and gimbles (verbs). wabe could be a few different things, probably a noun. borogroves- noun, mimsy-adj, etc etc. As mentoined, its a bit of an advanced abstract concept, but if you can get a student to realize that you can know what something refers to while having no idea what the word is, you can help them cut their work in half. Whenever they hear a new word in a sentence, they can look at the pattern and figure out if it's a noun, verb, adjective, etc. which helps them figure out what it actually means.
Read the newspaper with them. Pictures will draw their attention to certain articles and there is always the comics. Not to mention most (AFAIK) American based newspapers are based on a high school reading level, which lends itself to common/basic grammar and occasionally neat words thrown in now and then. The articles are short and the variety of topics should make each lesson unique because you won't be following one persons style or topic of writing. Of course, I'm assuming by 'expanding vocabulary' your goal is just to get them to a functional level and not of that which is required for the GREs.
I really love crosswords, so maybe I'm a bit biased, though.
We had our first lesson. I rocked it. It went very well.
What is some very basic grammar lessons? Last time we did adverbs, nouns, proper nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns and made a lot of progress.
Where should I go from there vis a vis grammar?
Also, he was so impressed with my lesson he decided to bring a friend next time. The friend is studying for his citizenship test.
How should I manage both students at once?
Haaaaalp!
Since you mostly focused on open classes of grammar (the only closed class you covered was pronouns), you could do something on the closed classes. He should know about prepositions, conjunctions, etc... Furthermore, all of these grammatical tenses will really help him in terms of constructing his own sentences. It's easy to use a thesaurus to find a synonym, but it's much more difficult to use a reference book to find the correct preposition.
I don't think, short of sending you lesson plans, that I can recommend any kind of specific grammar lessons off the top of my head. Mostly, I guess just keep working on usage and identifying what type a word is. Also, check around online and there's some good teaching websites with some decent shortened lesson plans.
If you have the chance, see what you can find out about the citizenship test. If there's anything you can find that they focus on, try to hit that occasionally.
Really, just keep up what you're doing. You're the one there, you've apparently done fantastically already, you know what is working, and what they need to work at; just trust your instincts.
www.onestopenglish.com
You can check out the business English section for career based lessons, Skills for lessons focusing on speaking, listening, reading and other skills, or Lesson Share for lesson plans submitted by teachers around the world. There's also a forum for discussing lesson ideas, so you'll very likely find posts from people in a similar situation to yourself.
I mostly teach computers now (and I've kind of slid into admin) but when I used the site all the lesson plans were divided into different levels so you could choose the one that suited your class/student best. Quite honestly, I found the site a better tool than any ESL book. And it's free!
I'd offer my own lesson ideas but the responses I've read are as good or better than anything I could come up with. I will offer a couple of tips: Test your student every now and then to get an honest idea of how he's progressing. Listen to what he wants. It's easy to get way overeager and throw yourself into something your student finds boring and has no desire to learn. Be confident. Yes, he should have some control since these are private lessons, but don't let him dictate too much so he ends up just doing stuff he likes and not working on what he needs.
That's all I can think of. Good luck and have fun!