Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Chronocide]

Whats good everyone

This is my first post and my topic on this site, and hopefully, I will be able to find help here from many experienced English teachers.

I have just finished high school, and I am now moving on to Uni in Korea and I got an offer for a tutoring job, paying around $50/hr, and teaching twice a week for an hour each. The student I'm going to teach is now going up to 3rd year in middle school (grade 9), and he has lived outside of Korea and studied English for an year before he came back in grade 6. I have talked to him in English, and he told me he doesn't have a problem understanding, so I (hope) communication will not be an issue during teaching.

But I digress, what I really need help on is the material I will be teaching the student with, and the teaching methods.

The mother wants me to teach him writing and vocabs, but what she ultimately wants is for him to improve his "reading" skills. I thought I was going to teach him TOEFL stuff, but she wants me to teach him reading through writing and memorizing vocabs. Actually, I don't even know what she really wants. She was kinda vague on it. I just remember the "reading" part. To be quite honest, I have no idea how to go about doing it.

They want:
-grammar (huh?)
-reading (The boy can read, but has a hard time understanding some parts. Think this probably has to do with not knowing enough vocab.)
-writing (the relatively easy part)

My plan is to basically:
-Give him an essay topic each time I see him, and have him have the essay and the outline ready for me the next time we have lessons again. When he brings the essay, we will go over mistakes, ways on which he could improve his arguments, etc, all that good stuff, and maybe show him a copy of the essay I wrote for the topic myself (dunno how this part is gonna go down. I'm a pretty lazy guy)
-give him some words to memorize, and have a small test each time (Btw, how many words are good you think? 10? 20?)
-go over some newspaper articles on sports (This guy LOVES sports. He told me he hates reading with a passion, but actually likes reading on sports stuff.) Actually, now that I wrote it, I don't even know if this is a good idea. Sounds pretty lame. Don't even know what I would follow this up with.

My biggest worry is the grammar part. I mean, I know English well enough, but I have never actually STUDIED grammar as a separate subject.
I could spot and correct his grammar in his writings and such, but I probably would have a hard time explaining WHY it is grammatically wrong.

Any tips and suggestions on basic teaching methods would be very appreciated.

Thanks all.

[comm]

Welcome to the forum!
While I wouldn't consider myself an "experienced English teacher", I'll toss in my two cents.

You may never know exactly what his mother wants, and what she does want may change regularly. But you can still keep her happy, and your ideas are great so far. Here are my tips:

Image is very important.
The more feedback you give to the student (that the mother can see) the better off you will probably be.

So for reading: if you give him an article to read, have him highlight and translate words he doesn't know. Then during your next lesson, help him make sentences with the words. Ideally, the article/translations/sentences would be together in a folder for later review.

For Vocab: I think 10 is enough, an hour will go quickly if you take the time to explain the usage of each during your lesson.

For Writing: Your ideas are great, though writing your own essay might be overkill. He should have the basics of essay writing down, so I would focus on correcting and improving his work. Again, the more written feedback his mother can see, the better.

[NYC_Gal 2.0]

Pick up a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. It should help with the grammar. You'll have (publishing) industry-standard reasons, at least.

[Chronocide]

Thanks a lot comm for your advice

[quote="NYC_Gal 2.0"]Pick up a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. It should help with the grammar. You'll have (publishing) industry-standard reasons, at least.[/quote]

I went to coex yesterday to buy it, but I couldn't find it. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place.

Tomorrow is my first lesson with him, and I gotta teach him for 2 hrs.
2HRS
What do I teach him?
The essay he writes for me and the newspaper article/vocab thing can't really be used until the lesson after tomorrow.

I think I'm having a panic attack. LOL
Should have prepared for the lessons instead of clowning around for the whole week.