Tutoring Help

Hi Bloggers,

As a requirement for my second language acquisition class, I must tutor an English language learner for approximately eight hours. When I first heard of this assignment I was extremely nervous. After spending some time thinking about whom I could help excel in the English language, I realized I could tutor a close friend who I worked with in a Mexican restaurant.

I had my first session with Alex this week. Alex is a 30 year old man from El Salvador. He can communicate in English but tends to make mistakes. He has lived in the United States for quite some time now. A text message from Alex could look like “she no come in today.” On my first session I prepared a bunch of activities for the verb “to be” in the present tense. I also created activities for contractions and the negative forms. Alex did wonderfully on these activities. No mistakes were made. I was very surprised because he does make these mistakes in his writing and speech. After reflecting on the material Alex requested some topics for our next session. He explained the difficulty he experiences when using the verbs in the infinitive, prepositions, and when to use the word “it”. He said he gets confused on why people use the word “it”; for example, “it is sunny outside today.”

Does anyone have any suggestions for my next session with Alex? Thanks for your help!

Vocabulary

1.       Requirement: an obligation, or something that is expected of you

2.       Approximately: roughly; a roundabout idea

3.       Extremely: very, really, enormously

4.       Excel: to surpass in something or exceed

5.       Communicate: converse, talk

6.       Reflecting: the act of thinking back on something; to recall information  

7.       Requested: to ask or wish for something

Exercise

Create your own sentences with the new vocabulary words using context clues. Here is an example “I would like to communicate with you via skype so I can see you.