Heather - Tutoring - Week 2

Yes, I met with both my CP and the woman I tutor, Chomy, today. I had a break between both the sessions, of course. I find the tutoring challenging and somewhat nervewracking. I feel inadequate in my role as tutor. I'm really learning just as much as she is, or hopefully is anyway. And I do share that with her too. 'We're both learning!'

Last week, I e-mailed Chomy a link to an article that she could both listen to and read. I asked her to write down the main points of the article and anything she had trouble with for us to go over together this week. The article was about the nicknames of New York. I didn't want to throw too much at her, but it turned out that article only had two things in it she didn't understand so she asked me to pick one a little harder for this week. Instead of just writing down the main ideas she did a short summary. For the most part I understood what she wrote, but a couple sentences did cause me trouble. Upon reading her e-mails I decided we had our work cut out for us! Her English isn't as good as Xin's. She does pause a lot while talking, but she is fairly good at communicating her ideas anyway, at least I think so. However, her writing needs work too. She tends to have trouble conveying what she really means to say. I'd ask her what she was trying to say with this sentence or that sentence and when she explained it to me I understood it perfectly. She really has some great thought processes going on! I would then tell her that this is the meaning I got out of it and we would (painfully) work our way through correcting things together.

I have discovered that asking leading questions is sometimes harder than one would think. This made it problematic to always get her to think of the right answers. I know I ended up doing way too much helping and talking tonight, which I inwardly cringed at. We worked together for two hours and as time passed it got a little better, but there's definitely room for improvement.

I noticed that she tends to reword exactly what she reads without fixing tenses, article, pronouns, prepositions, etc. (Think I know my grammar? She taught me a lot of the terms! lol Its amazing the things she does know, but then the things she struggles with.) She also has trouble dividing up ideas, or points, and developing them separately and clearly so that what she's trying to say is understood. For instance, she wrote 'The Big Apple became known for good fruit like original meanings.' When she explained that sentence to me I discovered she actually has a couple ideas crammed into that one sentence. The first is that the Big Apple became known-because of the name being used by a night club in Harlam and in a famous song. The second idea is roughly along the lines of using fruit as an analogy for why the nickname The Big Apple helps to reform the city's image into a good one.

We talked about taking ideas and developing them with the details that inspire them and not needing to stick rigidly to the words in the text. I devised and exercise on the spot to try and help her understand and practice this concept. I wrote down three different but similar ideas, in incomplete sentences and asked her to use them to write 5 sentences. After that we went over the sentences and looked at any errors and then I asked her to write a very short story using some of what she developed in those sentences. She did a good job, but we did need to make corrections. We'll work on it some more next week for sure. I made a point of praising her ideas and the direction she was coming from in her work, but also pointing out how we could improve these things. One of the hardest challenges we face is using the language at home because her husband doesn't want to really practice with her. Also her two year old son requires a lot of her time and energy, which makes it difficult for her to be able to sit down and focus on working on her English homework.

I really want to help her get the hang of really developing her ideas, separating them out when need be and conveying what she really means. Of course, I also want to help her with the grammar errors and comprehension, etc. We talked about something she could do to help her with listening comprehension. She actually asked me if subtitles were bad when watching tv/movies. I answered yes and no, saying that it does help her in understanding, but that it also distracts her from listening. Because she's focused on reading what is being said rather than listening to it she's not building her listening skills as well as one might think. She hears what's being said, but she's not listening to it. Instead of the visual text reinforcing what she's listening to, what she's hearing is reinforcing what she's reading. I suggested she could watch the first few minutes of a movie without subtitles then go back and watch it again with subtitles to see how much she understood.

We've got our work cut out for us, but I know we can do it. I decided to ask her to rewrite the summary for this article and she also requested that I send her another article on top of that! I know I'm going to need to do more prepping for these sessions! I'm also going to work on more exercises similar to the one I devised on the spot tonight. Hooray for challenge!