Today was my last meeting with Tom. I must say, throughout the course of the semester, I have noticed great improvement in his writing. In the beginning, his written grammar was horrid, filled with prepositional, adverbial and conventional errors. At first, I did not even know where to begin with him. With time, I learned to observe his major problem areas and focused on them. Every week, he displayed knowledge of what I had explained to him by correcting his own mistakes in his writing. In other words, we would sit together and read his written work together. Whenever I noticed a mistake, I asked him to reread the sentence aloud and point out any errors he noticed. In this way, he was able to notice that there was something wrong in the sentence and would point out exactly what needed to be changed, even if he did not know how to make the correction. What mattered more to me was that he was able to notice his errors. During our sessions, we focused on grammar, mostly. I explicitly explained to him the purpose of prepositions and differentiated between them. We focused on articles, and talked about vowels and consonants, which he was clueless about. Last night, as I read a research paper he was working on, I was very proud to see that his lexical and syntactical errors had diminished. The only problem evident in his work was that he was unfamiliar with the format and structure of a research paper. Regardless of this, his sentences were well constructed and made sense. I praised him for his achievements and success. I could tell he felt more confident in his writing and that made me feel happy and fulfilled. Tom expressed sadness because he knew that was our last session. Tom asked me if I would be able to tutor him next semester. He was very grateful for my help and that really meant a lot to me as a future educator. This was an enriching and valuable experience for both of us; Tom was able to improve his grammar and I was able to apply and see in action the concepts and techniques I have learned so much about in my Linguistics courses.
Madeline,
ReplyDeleteI hope you have some time to tutor him during the summer months or in the fall. If not, you may want to recommend a highly competent student interested in working with an L2 learner. It makes all the difference in the world working with a native speaker of the language.