I met with my tutees – Xiao-Wei, Marcos, and Daree. Daree was not feeling very well and
asked to be excused. I asked
Xiao-Wei and Marcos if there was anything that they would like to work on
besides the materials that I had prepared for them. They both wanted me to go over the lesson that they had in class
that day and the lesson from the day before. Both of them are in the same class – foundations level.
The lesson had a collage of about 20 pictures of people doing
various daily activities – brushing teeth, showering, getting dressed, cooking…
I asked them to take turns making complete sentences in the simple present
tense (that was taught in class that day). We worked on pronunciation, verb tenses, and articles. Xiao-Wei had a hard time pronouncing
the word “brush” and “breakfast”.
She practiced the words several times and got better at them, but the
combination of the two letters “br” is still a challenge. Neither Marcos nor Xiao-Wei had prior
foreign language experience. They
both sometime forgot to put an “s” at the end of the 3rd person verb
form. The words beginning with the
letters “th” had to be practiced over and over.
I encouraged both of them not to be shy, but to keep
practicing until they see results.
I told Marcos that if I were to start learning Spanish, I would be
making a lot of mistakes. I told
them that I could also learn different things from them.
We looked at the pictures and made sentences about “eating
lunch”. Both of them ended up
introducing me to the dining hall on campus that I did not know about. It turned out that it is very close to
our building and convenient for Greg and me to eat at in the future.
Marcos and Xiao-Wei went over the pictures again without
looking at the words. They were
able to describe the activities from the pictures alone. We also went over the lesson from the
day before. I asked at the end of
the session if it was helpful to them.
They both agreed that it was very good for them to be able to practice
their lesson with me.
It is good that you helped them to see that in language learning, it is natural and expected that mistakes are made. Including yourself as one who would make such mistakes was a good establishment of common ground with them. I also liked that you went back and had them review the pics without the words. That was positive reinforcement/reward. Good job!
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