Adrian Green - TS#9
Earlier this week I had my 9th tutoring session. Since the listening exercises from previous weeks had been going so well I thought we would do a slightly more advanced book. I chose to teach the 1st half of the book "The Lorax" by Dr. Seus and, let me tell you, it did not go as well as I'd hoped.
Before the class I did have some doubts because there are words in most Dr. Seus stories which are made up (not real English) words. I was thinking this would confuse my tutee without actually helping anything but I decided to do the book anyways. My main reason for doing the book despite these foreseen issues was because I thought it could be good to work on ambiguity tolerance. Since most of the made up words don't actually add to the meaning, but are really there to just add semantic flavor, I thought it would be doable.
In the pre-listening portion of the class I went over many of the words and phrases from the story which my student may not have been familiar with. I also went over the most common names which are used in the book, namely The Once-ler, The Lorax, and Truffula Trees. However when we did the lesson my tutee had a great amount of difficulty understanding the material. Upon reviewing the material it became evident to me that even the parts of the book which are written in normal English vocabulary are more along the lines of intermediate or upper intermediate reading material. My tutee is on more beginner level of English so this was a big of a difficulty to overcome.
After these intelligibility issues I started doing some more in depth explaining of the story but are class time was nearly over at this point so I resigned myself to change stories for our next session. Even though the reading comprehension segment of the session went poorly I feel as though the first half in which grammar and vocabulary was taught were overall successful.
Before the class I did have some doubts because there are words in most Dr. Seus stories which are made up (not real English) words. I was thinking this would confuse my tutee without actually helping anything but I decided to do the book anyways. My main reason for doing the book despite these foreseen issues was because I thought it could be good to work on ambiguity tolerance. Since most of the made up words don't actually add to the meaning, but are really there to just add semantic flavor, I thought it would be doable.
In the pre-listening portion of the class I went over many of the words and phrases from the story which my student may not have been familiar with. I also went over the most common names which are used in the book, namely The Once-ler, The Lorax, and Truffula Trees. However when we did the lesson my tutee had a great amount of difficulty understanding the material. Upon reviewing the material it became evident to me that even the parts of the book which are written in normal English vocabulary are more along the lines of intermediate or upper intermediate reading material. My tutee is on more beginner level of English so this was a big of a difficulty to overcome.
After these intelligibility issues I started doing some more in depth explaining of the story but are class time was nearly over at this point so I resigned myself to change stories for our next session. Even though the reading comprehension segment of the session went poorly I feel as though the first half in which grammar and vocabulary was taught were overall successful.
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