Colin TS#1

Date/Time: 5/13/2017 3:15PM-4:15PM

Location: Panera

Topic/Skill: getting acquainted, English proficiency evaluation. Apart from basic conversation oriented towards getting-acquainted, I asked my tutee to go through a few simple activities designed to help gauge her English proficiency, including the suggested questionnaire, a brief online grammar quiz which uses multiple choice questions to gauge proficiency in specific grammar issues (url: www.world-english.org/test.htm), a short spoken reading from a children’s reader (Owl At Home by Arnold Lobel), a brief writing sample asking her to describe a place that she likes, and a request to translate two sentences provided to her in her first language into English so that I could evaluate her ability to freely form English language sentences that convey a fairly simple message that she already knows.

Feedback provided to tutee: I agree with my tutee that the area for most improvement (and the area most useful for her based on her stated goals in learning English) is in speaking and listening comprehension. She sometimes struggled with pronunciation and grammar, but she performed the best with the written word. In asking her to read a short children’s story aloud, I found that she is pretty competent in sounding out most short unfamiliar words, but she does need to build her vocabulary a bit. We noted words that she didn’t know in the story, and looked them up together after the activities were done. As a means to help her build vocabulary faster, I gave her an English-English pocket dictionary that I bought cheaply at a used book store. I suggested that if she encounters a word she doesn’t know that she look up the definition there, and then look up unfamiliar words from the definition in her Chinese-English dictionary. This was only given as a suggestion, based on some success I’ve had using this method to help build my vocabulary in Chinese, but she appreciated it. Because listening comprehension is important for what she wants to achieve, and because she likes to watch TV and movies, we discussed strategies for watching English language television and films that can help her with her listening comprehension.

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: I am struck by the near total lack of stress that language learning seems to put on Hui-sin. She was extremely outgoing and appreciative of help. In fact, while we completed the necessary activities within the dedicated hour, we continued to just chat for about another additional hour informally. One issue that makes me slightly nervous is that she is aware I speak some Chinese, and while I don’t believe my Chinese proficiency is much better than her English, at times we would use Chinese during the more informal parts of our meeting, if she got stumped on an English word or something like that. I tried to make sure to always steer us back to English use since she is paying to improve her English (I am not paying to improve my Chinese) but it did keep happening. That said, while it did come up a few times, it was almost exclusively outside of designated tutoring time. I suppose this raises the question of where an appropriate line may be drawn for use of a students’ native language in teaching English.