Alexandra TP 8

TUTORING PARTNER 8 – Geonae, Meeting 4

Having now met with Geonae four times now, I can see that the underlying problem behind our difficulty in communication is still her nervousness about speaking. Still, Geonae is very compliant and motivated, as exemplified by the fact that today she came in with more than triple the amount of homework I had asked her to prepare, all done with meticulous care. We went over her assignment which was to copy down sentences from a children’s book. She can now very quickly identify parts of speech, and today’s exercise proved to me that Geonae knows, at least in written form, far more English than is evident. I worry about boring her by belaboring things she may already know, but I’m taking the approach of “better safe than sorry”.

Sensing her perhaps masked comprehension of some English, I had her read aloud the sentences which she had deconstructed for homework, and although she could sign or insinuate the definitions of most of the words and place them in the correct category (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, article, conjunction, etc.), and though her understanding of sentence structures is improving, when I asked her to read aloud, I found that her pronunciation was far more choppy and awkward than I had initially noticed. I now understand why she would feel so shy about speaking.

Previously she had read a short passage for me and did rather well. Now, however, it seems obvious that she is not used to certain phonetic constructs. It required a longer reading than I had ever asked her for previously in order to diagnose this issue. I told her that it was my hope that we could continue to make her more comfortable with sentence varieties, so that we could slowly transfer her away from the page to vocally producing small sentences.

For this purpose I gave her a “mad-libs” like set of sentence structures so that she could have a template for generating new sentences with her new vocabulary lists. After checking her homework next week, I will introduce her to pronunciation exercises to ease this half of her anxiety, hopefully slowly making her feel more confident, especially with the new vocabulary she’s accrued and currently studying.