Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi, I'm Jeff. For about two and a half months, I have had my first assignment, working with a Korean couple here in Massachusetts to help improve their pronunciation and vocabulary, which is their stated goal. They have been in the United States for just under a year. He is an opthalmologist and she is a pediatrician. Their grammar and vocabulary, at least using on-a-daily-basis English are pretty good. Their accents are quite thick (I apologize if that's considered a derogatory term, please say so if that's true), to the point that I know that I miss some of what they say (and, of course, vice versa, their "What did he just say?" blank stare being quite recognizable; I know I have to work on that).

My ESL training was very brief. What was to have been a 16- to 18-hour course was squeezed into four hours. There were only two of us trainees present, and the trainer said most of what she omitted was role-playing exercises. But, still, I'm not sure what I've missed from not having completed the full course.

I am a librarian by training. I have a good instinctive grasp of English, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what, for example, the pluperfect was nor have I diagrammed a sentence since 1968.

My struggle is in coming up with a systematic way to teach. We mostly just talk, which they find helpful, but I don't know if that's the best way for me to help them. We've done occasional pronunciation pairs exercises, but only as far as my saying the words and their repeating them back. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at ESL resources on the Web and I have bought some books - an Oxford picture dictionary, and two Practice Makes Perfect titles, Intermediate English Grammar for ESL Learners and English Verbs - but the exercises online and in the books seem heavily oriented towards classroom environments. I'm only teaching two, highly educated people.

So I thought I'd ask here for any advice you would care to give. I would like to hear specifically from people who have experience tutoring on a one-on-one basis what kinds of techniques and strategies you use.

Thank you for your time.

I'd recommend getting some textbook(s) more geared towards teaching grammar in/through more conversational settings/dialogues* (browse your bookstore and see which book's dialogues grab you), then throw in a few 100% authentic native-speaker patterns every now and then for receptive purposes (perhaps gleaned from books by the like of Carter & McCarthy - Exploring Spoken English, Exploring Grammar in Context, The Cambridge Grammar of English and From Corpus to Classroom are all worth a look, and there are many books available on Conversation or Discourse Analysis, some of which are mentioned in the first section of books recommended in the following post: http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 851#547851 ); there is no reason why what works for larger classrooms won't work for smaller (I am speaking here as a teacher who has always shunned being at all imperious with students, and strived to generate a more conversational approach even in large classrooms - switching to a smaller simply allows more time and opportunities to identify, present and "teach" the "stuff" of conversation, which at first and its simplest is, you introduce whatever into the conversation, then student tries with a related tidbit or anecdote, or simply models their turn on yours. This beats just slapping a text down and expecting it to come to life with little preparation or effort on especially the teacher's part ~ not that the study/dissection of texts is a bad thing, esp. when more complex texts are involved, it's just I don't think many teachers really attempt to make them "appear" in a more gradual and natural way in actual speech from the start...try to look at an illustrative text only afterwards, and if the student has done well and played their part(s), then there is no reason why THAT could not form the textual exemplar and "record" . A search for 'Dogme' with me as author may be interesting and help give you some idea of my approach, such as it is - I am still a looong way from having a conversation course, and beyond that readers etc, mapped out!).

Or you could just take a look at something like: http://books.google.co.uk/books?q=bilbrough+dialogue

I know it's "Business English", but I just thought I'd also mention Hollett et al's In at the Deep End for its brisk "sweep" and range of often amusing activities.

BTW, Collins have recently released an English-Korean version of their Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary of American English:
http://elt.heinle.com/cgi-telt/course_p ... number=301

*I took a quick look on Google Book Search at the PMP Intermediate Grammar that you mentioned, and it looked a little dry for my tastes, and with quite a mix of sentences (often a bit too simple/inauthentic/strange/decontextualized or whatever, or a bit of a jumble when more authentic-sounding). I don't know what the PMP English Verbs book is like, but I hope it doesn't make English appear like French or anything (tables of never-ending "tenses" - remember that the two actual, simple tenses do a lot of work in English, and that the 'compound tenses' - "tense-plus/tense+" i.e. involving aspect, don't need to be practised in every possible but possibly unlikely permutation). I reckon Murphy's Grammar in Use series give more organized and immediately useful examples and, what's more, are available in partially-translated English-Korean editions. Personally, I wouldn't use these too much in lessons, but rather would set them as homework (the edition with answers will be useful for students once they leave the teacher for good, provided they don't cheat when working on stuff that teacher has currently set!) and quickly go through and check the answers (that is, questions and answers, fully!) orally in the next lesson, either before the lesson proper if there are related language points to still be worked on, or towards the end if the exercises were unrelated or remedial or whatever.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?ur ... phy+Korean
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/cata ... 0521528763

fluffyhamster:

thank you for your detailed reply, and i apologize for my tardy response. i have looked at your links and will continue to mine their content for teaching ideas.

No worries, Jeff! Here's to hoping that you get more replies!