Upon receiving all my tutoring information from the ESOL tutoring center at the Leon Public Library, I instantly was given a “tutee”. Her name is Sugia Lee, a woman from South Korea who has a graduate degree in computer science. Thus, she is extremely intelligent, and even having what she considers “extremely low” skills in English, she watched my lips and body language and slowly considered what I was saying to then roughly formulate it in her own words. We did that for a while—one of us saying something, the other repeating it in simpler terms, and agreeing about understanding. I immediately asked her about her comfort levels in English, as the library has every tutee fill out a form designating different situations that the individual may have different understanding in. She would nod a lot when I spoke, which I quickly learned was her actively listening, but not exactly comprehending, so I would ask if she understood after most sentences. She told me she mostly wanted to practice speaking—her speaking in English and I correcting either her grammar or her pronunciation. She let me know that this particular meeting had to be cut short because her family from Korea was in town, and she had to go meet them. Of course, she has a family, a husband who studies at Florida State, and a son who is in middle school—and our meeting time interfered with her cooking and eating dinner with her family. So, I told her the next meeting we would begin with a simple lesson plan, most likely the one I wrote for our grammar lesson plan on Pronouns. This, I believe, would be easiest to get her to memorize some small vocabulary, begin writing in English, and begin speaking to me in English. I will attack errors as they occur in tutoring, as she specifically requested such. Overall, I think we both can learn a lot from each other in terms of teaching and learning!
No comments:
Post a Comment