Sabrina TS #2

Date: March 10th 

At my place at 10AM morning 

My second tutee immigrated to America a year ago. Her name is Taslima Akter and she is from Bangladesh. I first met Taslima when she had newly arrived to America a year ago and it was only recently that she got in touch with me to see if there was anyone who could help her with English. Last time she studied English academically was back in high school and it has been many years since then. She has been trying to relearn English with the help of youtube videos. We sat down for our first session and began with questions from the tutoring handout. Taslima’s goal to learn English is so she can communicate with other people. She wants to be able to socialize with people of all places and English happens to be the language everyone communicates with. She also has plans to attend TCC in the near future. Taslima is in a beginner stage in terms of understanding and speaking English. I had to repeat my words many times slowly for her to comprehend. She kept emphasizing to me that she has problems with verb tense. When I asked her to describe her family, she would say something and then pause to correct herself again. She seemed more focused on correcting her grammar than letting herself simply speak. I encouraged her to speak without thinking. To say as she felt and not worry about the errors. I also advised her to try not to translate from her native language to English as this would not help her improve. While Taslima wants to work on grammar and speaking, I think it would be best to concentrate on her listening and speaking skills. She showed me some of the youtube videos she has been following and they all seemed to be on grammar structures. However I find that grammar is getting in the way of Taslima’s speaking practice. After going through the tutoring handout, we concentrated more on speaking skills. I asked her to describe her family back home. I asked her to describe her favorite places to visit in her home country. Through these small speaking activities I was able to assess Taslima’s level of vocabulary knowledge. The biggest challenge for me is to help Taslima get comfortable speaking English without worrying about her grammar. She is very adamant in speaking accurately than speaking fluently. For our next session, I told Taslima to watch a youtube video and find words or phrases she couldn’t understand and we would talk about them together.