Alexandra TP 5

TUTORING PARTNER 5 – Geonae, Meeting 1

Geonae Kim is very pretty, young Korean lady who has very recently come to live in the US with her family. Goenae’s husband does research in some sort of hard-science, though I was not able to understand with any great clarity what exactly it is that her husband does at the university, and which University in particular he is attending. Though Geonae has done some college in Korea and has some comprehension of written English, she exhibits virtually zero verbal functionality and mostly laughs when asked a question. She usually answers me with “Oh! yes, sir,” to almost everything, so I have to question her quite a bit to find out whether she’s actually understanding what I’ve been saying, which oftentimes she hasn’t. She is generally very quiet.

Though it quickly became clear to me that behind this shyness Geonoe does have a very modest vocabulary, she either lacks conference or the ability to link these isolated words with each other in a sentence. Fortunately, she seems to have a very good work ethic, having self-referred to the Leon county library system and demonstrating great concentration during the lesson.

Since the very little I know about Geonae is that she has a children, and she is often at home alone with them, I hope to build her up to the point where she can construct basic sentences pertaining to needs and emergency situations. Last week, we worked together in being able to identify and describe the relationships between members of a family as seen on a genealogical tree. It was this exercise which first made me aware that she is not comfortable using pronouns. In order to achieve the goal of helping her form simple sentences, I must first find a way to be able to recognize personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns as well possessive pronouns.

After she has mastered these, I hope to move in to the introduction of a few important verbs. While she develops these basic skills, I hope to assign her English language learning cartoons that she can watch with her young children, as well as selected English lessons from you tube that accurately and clearly address these critical first steps in sentence formation. I hope that this strategy works, and I hope to be able to make modifications as new needs come up. I am looking forward to our next meeting where I will be able to see what she interpreted from the homework which I assigned her, and will do my best to make her feel her own progress. I have never tutored a student from essentially the beginning, so any suggestions in constructing a more comprehensive plan would be appreciated.