Response #4

Over the past few weeks, I have been working as an ESL tutor for a graduate student from China. My experience working with this student has been extremely different than working with the ESL students that I teach at Red Cedar Elementary School. To start, the boy that I tutor is much more advanced in his English language abilities. He is strong with his grammar skills, comfortable writing in English, and relatively comfortable conversing in his L2. This is drastically different from the students at Red Cedar Elementary School who are beginning language learners. They have great difficultly using grammar and conventions correctly and tend to be rather uncomfortable when speaking in English.

When working with this graduate student, the topics that we focus on and they way that I implement my tutoring skills are very different than they are when I am working with beginning learners. Through talking with him, I have learned that he is somewhat self-conscious about his pronunciation of certain words and wants to be able to speak naturally about topics that are frequently discussed among college students. In order to work towards his goals, we have done a few different types of activities. In our initial sessions, we spent time going over the names of different places on and near MSU's campus. He would read the list, and if an error was made, I would pause him and say something along the lines of "let's look at this letter here- what sound does it make on its own?" or "This letter combination is similar to the letter combination in (previous word from list). Based on that, do you think that you could try that pronunciation again?". By doing this, he could recognize the mistakes and decode on his own to correct himself. We also did a similar activity with common American names.

In our most recent sessions, the entire time has been spent mostly just conversing about different topics such as school life, hobbies, sports, etc. In general, topics that young adults like to talk about. The conversations are very natural, and I am able to implement corrective feedback mostly when I question for clarity or summarize a statement that he has made. This way, he is able to know if he communicated his message in a correct manner, and if not, he has the ability to use his previous knowledge to correct his miscommunication.

It has been very different working with beginner and advanced language students and it has been a fun challenge to use the methods that we have learned in class to help both levels of language learners be as successful as possible in language comprehension.