Teacher Discussion Forums

I tried to read the past entries to see if this topic has already been addressed, but after several pages I gave up! So, sorry if you just talked about this. I have a 1-on-1 student. Her husband's company is paying for her ESL classes, and generously I think. She recently told me that just talking with me is a good lesson for her, but I feel guilty getting paid $40 dollars an hour to just talk. Am I right in thinking this way, or should I "take the money and run". I'm new to tutoring (I've volunteered with free ESL programs a lot) I want to do a good job so she will improve and so I will feel justified in getting paid. Shouldn't we be using a book?
Thank you so much!

If the woman has good enough English to be able to make light conversation, and isn't pressing you to teach anything in specific, then why not take the money? If however you're still worried that you need to appear to be teaching something to justify the money, then you could start surreptitiously making notes of her errors, or apparent gaps in her powers of expression; and there's no shortage of language points you could look at, once you (yourself, at least) start looking - check out the stuff that get discussed on the Applied Linguistics forum, for a start! (Not all of it can be immediately applied, though). A lot will probably depend on how closely she wants to integrate into the L2 community and/or her future needs (I'm assuming you're both in the US at present).

If you want some suggestions for books (not just textbooks for both of you to use, but grammar books for yourself, your own reference and development etc) then just ask...but if you start wondering about doing a formal qualification (I'm assuming also that you're totally "unqualified" i.e. I don't think TEFL certificates, CELTAs etc are the be all and end all), you'd do better browsing and/or joining the Newbie forum (part of the International/Job Discussion forums).

You can also go to SEARCH which is just above these messages and type in turtoring. There are a lot of former messages on tutoring. Here is one

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... t=tutoring

I have been on the student side of tutoring with a number of teachers in more than one language, so I have the student view on this topic. I hired graduate students who were native speakers; they were already teaching undergrads as TAs. I attribute my fluency in Spanish totally to tutoring, and highly recommend it. People are surprised when I tell them I learned Spanish in the USA, and have never lived or studied abroad.

I did not find books all that helpful during tutoring. Sometimes the tutor would write down some examples to clarify an issue. It is of course good to have a reference book on grammar, etc., as well as a good bilingual dictionary. I have sometimes been assigned homework to write some sentences on a particular topic, this can be helpful as well. Have them print it double-spaced and mark up what they wrote, and explain what they did wrong.

One area that tutoring is good for is pronunciation. You can work with the student until they pronounce the words correctly, something you can't do in a large class.

Conversation is valuable in itself, just the practice. If you have taken a lot of classes you may still be afraid to open your mouth, and not sure what to say when you do. As someone suggested, take notes (mental or otherwise) of consistent errors or patterns of errors, and work on those until the student is doing it right. It is a bit of a balancing act between too much correction, that can discourage the student and make it difficult for him to speak, and too little correction, so he doesn't correct his mistakes. One on one, it should be easy to work the balance that is comfortable for the student.

One thing that I think is sometimes overlooked are the little phrases that you hear every day. "That's right". "Sounds good." "How are you doing"? This is something to work with the student on. Using these phrases really helps keep a conversation flowing in a natural way, and also avoids having to construct a new sentence every time you open your mouth.

Don't feel guilty taking the money, just put out an effort to improve the student's speech.

Richard

Thanks everyone so much for their advice. I appreciate your time so much. It was really helpful!