Sabrina - Tutoring Wk 4 - "Turkish Delight."

Wednesday night I felt like a real teacher.

At our first meeting and looking over her "comfort survey" (the diagnostic doc the ESL program use to gauge clients comfort with English), I saw that Serap wanted help with everything English - speaking, listening, reading and writing. So, we set out some goals for us to work on over the course of our time together. We wrote down the big goals first and then chose our small ones based on the steps to get to the big picture.

In planning for Wednesday, I decided to break up our sessions into two parts that followed a theme: first part would be more about the rules, mechanics, and grammar of the language and the second part would focus on practicing skills - reading, writing, speaking, and listening. This week's theme was about introductions and meetings.

I put about two hours into preparing. I created a vocabulary sheet that consisted of a list of nouns, a list of verbs, and a list of prepositions. I emailed that to her three days before we met so she could have time to study them, look them up, etc. Everything we did during our session was focused on this vocabulary.

We covered three parts of speech (noun, verb, preposition) and three simple verb tenses (past, present, and future) - three, is the magic number if you haven't heard. Then we practiced these. Serap is smart as a whip. She aced everything with very little difficulty. I can't believe she said she was uncomfortable with English when she clearly is a language sponge.

Then, I had planned we would focus on listening and reading skills in the second part but we only got through listening before it was time to go. I had written a brief monologue of introduction of myself. Each simple sentence contained one or more words of our vocabulary list. I read through it three times (it is the magic number, truly). The first time I asked her to just listen. The second time I asked her to use her list and circle the vocabulary words off the list as she heard them. I told her I would read through it one more time for her to check and get ones she missed.

I will have you know that she missed very little! Even with prepositions like to, at, and in, she was a hawk!

I read through it one last time at a faster speed and then asked her content questions about what was read.

For home work I gave her the time line sheet and asked her to chose at least eight of the verbs from the list and write them in past, present, or future tense for any pronoun of her choice but to write it in the correct location on the time line.

I also made a verb tense, fill-in-the-blank worksheet for her that had ten sentences that were missing verbs in their proper tense. I gave her the verb that was needed (from our list) and what tense it should be in:

1. Serap wants to go to school. She ____________________ to the university next year. (apply, future tense)

Lastly, I gave her a copy of the monologue and asked her to find the words from the vocabulary list and write N, V, or P over it. If it is V, I asked for the tense.

Serap was excited to get homework, if you can believe it. She also picked up the third DVD in the Easy English series from the resource room.

In closing I have chosen to pick the same three tasks for each week:

• set the next meeting time and place
• asked her when she had used English during the last week
• set an English use goal for the coming week.

You know, this teaching tutoring thing might just go okay.