Teacher Discussion Forums

Although I spent a few years teaching English as a Second Language, my experience has been entirely with adults.

My partner and I recently moved to South Korea to teach in a private school. The director of the school has asked us to teach his son english. There is some good resources here but we are at a loss of where to start and what to do.

He is 11 years old, he can read well but his comprehension level is low. Also his pronounciation can use a lot of work. So far I have been bringing in short, one page stories. We first go over the word stress and syllibication of the story, also when we are doing this I correct any words that he pronounces wrong. This usually takes all class (I work with him for 30 minutes and then my partner who is also here teaching with me works with him for another half an hour). Then the next day we go over the story again and then I give him a short reading comprehension test. My partner has been basically doing the same thing. It seems however that he is making the same mistakes, although this may be simply because we have only been working together for 2 weeks.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

Corey

How about getting him to write some stories of things he is interested in and illustrate them or take photos to make small books he can then read to you or you could tape for him. Games could be fun too if he is not the very serious type.

He will have some books from school that you could review with him.

You could make a word wall of interesting words with some with difficult pronunciation thrown in.

Remember to catch him doing things correctly rather than focusing on things he does poorly.

I once got exactly the same experience. Your might to initiate his interest about learning but not making him view you just as an english only to infuse what he should learn. My that kid was an avid fan of NBA, so i mingled 'what he should learn' with facts of NBA. e.g, one unit of his textbook is about 'animals and how to classify them', then we explore the logo of each NBA team, some are with the animal feature, he showed great interest on that, and obviously i've achieved the expected gain, and he surely didn't notice my design, it all worked unconsciously.

Encourage him to make his own story is no doubt a good idea, making him feel as the main body of this learning process.

not quite sure whether it helps, wish you good luck [/quote]