Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi,

I am currently tutoring a Kuwaiti college student, and I'm faced with a good but challenging problem. During the course of our first two weeks together (about 16 hours of teaching time), I've incorporated a number of activities to help him boost his reading skills and vocabulary. I also have encouraged him to come to our meetings with any unfamiliar words he comes across.

My concern is that I'm giving him too much of a good thing. He's become very proactive about this, and his notebook is already full of 50+ words he's found, and the list keeps growing!

Thus far I've had him choose 20 words per week to memorize, which I then quiz him on. He's very good at memorizing them, so there is room for him to memorize more. I don't want to discourage him, but I am concerned that by the end of the semester, we'll have a gargantuan list of words, and we could end up spending more time on vocabulary than reading or conversation skills.

It might be easier if he copies down the sentence that the word is used in or brings the page with several words.

If he puts the words on a computer dictionary program, it will automatically store them and he can find them quickly in alphabetical order. It is better if he has a sentence to use the word so he can see the context. Of course, some words will have more than one meaning and thus more than one sentence.

You could use those words in the conversation. I presume that they are often specific to his field of study so discussions in his field would be appropriate. You don't have to know anything about it but just have him explain.