Ben - TP #13

This past week I was having some troubles finding a tutee here in New Orleans to help me complete the remainder of my sessions. I talked to my parents and my grandparents, asking them if they knew of anyone who did not speak English very well and would like some tutoring lessons. That's when my grandmother reminded me that she has a close friend, Glenda, who she has known and worked with for over a decade, who still cannot speak English very well and would probably love the opportunity. So this past Tuesday I met up with Glenda for our first tutoring session together. Glenda is in her mid-fifties and from Honduras, so this gave me a brand new valuable experience teaching an older woman from a South American country. Turns out, it wasn't all that different from my other teaching experiences.
At first I just wanted to get a feel for how proficient Glenda was in English. She had taken classes at Tulane a few different times over the years, but never enough to become fluent. I asked her if she felt most comfortable reading, listening to, or speaking English. She said reading was not too much of a problem but her listening and speaking skills have always been something she would like to work on. This was great news because I had two lesson plans focused on those very things. So for our first session was spent on listening. I used my lesson plan that involved reading a story to Glenda and then having her do a dictocomp and a dictation exercise. This was useful (for her to do both) because it allowed me to get a good measure of where exactly her skills were. To start, I modeled each exercise and went over some vocabulary terms. Then we did the exercise. Glenda had no problem doing the dictation exercise but the dictocomp was a bit more difficult for her. She could articulate some of what she thought the story was about, but other comprehension questions confused her. We went over these together and by the end of it she had a great understanding of the story. I decided that for our next session I would switch it up and do something I did with Fumie that worked really well. I asked Glenda to prepare her own dictation about one of her favorite movies and read it to me out loud.