Heather+Greenfield

====7/22/2012 (Tim Conrad): Svetlana and Arturo are such fascinating, fun people to work with! And you did a great job, Heather, figuring out ways to make their classes fun and also advanced for their high-level skills and interests in business and other career topics. Well-done instruction and reflection on your experiences!====

7/19/2012 (Penny Lawrence)
====I also was a little reluctant to give feedback to adults. That was one of the things I was very worried about and yet have been pleasantly surprised. I guess they would not have come to an adult ESL class if they thought that they did everything 100% perfect, and since they are coming they obviously want to be better. If we did not give them feedback that was accurate, how would they know how to accomplish their goals. It really have been a great learning experience and I have enjoyed getting to know you better too.====

7/19/2012 (Snow Smith)

I like that you pay attention to what your students’ level first then you find materials that they both interested in and meet their needs. I watched your group and I could tell they enjoyed your lesson. In the future, I would like to know more about how you make your grammar lessons more fun. I learned the grammar lessons in a traditional way and I would love to know more fun tips. Also, I think it is so true that you mention the more you provide them opportunities to play, explore, and use the target language, the more they enjoy the lesson, and the higher language retention rate will be. I have also tried to apply them as much as possible in my classroom as well and it always worked out well.

July 17, 2012 Today I only had Svetlana to tutor. This was good because she wanted to practice interviewing; I really enjoyed this lesson. During this time had a few moments where she didn’t understand a common idiom, or pronounced something incorrectly, but for the most part, we focused on the United States workplace and workplace team dynamics. Instead of being an English teacher, I felt a little bit more like Svetlana’s life coach. We had a lot of great dialogue and I think I gave her a lot of insight into office politics, employer expectations, and what is expected of team members in an office. The end of the interview was the best part though. I asked Svetlana to tell me what she enjoyed doing in her spare time. She told me she liked to swim and had once been on a competitive team. She developed a metaphor through this question. She talked about how a swim team is like an office team. When a good team is working just among themselves, they are competitive and always try to outdo each other. However, when a team needs to complete a task, a swim meet or a deadline, they need to each do their best and support each other so that they can succeed. I think Svetlana’s knowledge, as well as her ability to speak fluently, clearly, and intelligently will be a great asset for whom ever is smart enough to higher her.

July 11, 2012

Both Aurtoro and Svetlana picked an article that was interesting. Unfortunately, the only time we had was for Svetlana’s article. While reading it, I would stop them any time they pronounced a word incorrectly. Svetlana’s accent is very faint, and I only had to stop her on a couple of words; two words that I think many native English speakers probably mispronounce regularly. Aurturo was a different story. The last time he read, I noticed that he blended his words together and used the /s/ sound frequently at the end; like when he speaks Spanish. I pointed this out to him and told him to say meticulously each word distinctly and separately from the others; I then gave him some examples. After, he read as instructed and his pronunciation was much better. I do not believe that before this day he had ever thought of how much choppier the English language is than his rolling and flowing Spanish. We didn’t get to his article, but he said he wanted to reread it and practice his pronunciation in this way. I look forward to hear his progress.

July 9, 2012

Today we read articles from the New York Times. Both Aurturo and Svetlana really seemed to enjoy this activity. The objective of the lesson was to read aloud and discuss the articles read. I told them this time I wouldn’t be correcting their pronunciation of particular words, but rather I would mention some general pronunciation problems they might work on. Both read quite well and we were able to have some good dialogue. We all talked about where they thought they needed work and help in pronunciation. For the next class, I gave Autoro and Svetlana each a different Time magazine. I told them to pick an article and we would read them next time. I also told them that the next lesson would mainly focus on pronunciation and discussing the definition of any words they may not know.

July 7, Tim Conrad: Did Arturo handle the input okay? Because, if so, I think this is a great way for him to get even better at his natural conversation and work-related communication so that people appreciate his wonderful personality and abilities even more.

- I agree Dr. Conrad, Autoro has a lot of wonderful things to say. He seemed to handle the input fairly well. I was worried we might hurt his feelings with too much constructive criticism, but it didn't seem to hurt his feelings and I think he really wants to improve.

July 2, 2012

My two tutees’ homework was to write a proposal, specific to their work needs, and come prepared to present it. Both were very prepared and presented well. However, during this presentation, I realized that language, interpretation, and accents are not all that make communication difficult. My tutee, Aurturo, is very analytical and became very focused on the statistical information he was presenting. His focus on this made it hard to understand what the overall goal of his proposal was. It was hard for me to stay focused on the plan he was presenting when he was giving me so much information. Svetlana also had to ask what the main goal was that he wanted to accomplish. We talked to Aurtoro about summarizing his plan at the beginning of the proposal and then restating it at the end; he agreed that this would improve his presentation. Aurturo’s proposal was difficult to understand, he is still working on pronunciation and some of his grammar is slightly irregular, but I don’t think this was why we had a hard time understanding him. If Svetlana and I were both statisticians, we may have understood him better, or would have been able to follow along more. We were given too much information, in an unfamiliar format, to handle at that moment and were unable to follow along. During this lesson, I came to the realization that it isn’t just how well a person can speak and write in a language their personality can also play a part in successful communication with others.

As a teacher, this makes me think of the amount of information, as well as the type of information, I give my students and how lost they may become because of it. I can really see, especially for an ESL student, how smaller, focused chunks of information are much more manageable for understanding and retention.

July 1, TC: Heather, you have such interesting students and I'm sure they really enjoy what you're doing with your carefully-thought-out articles for reading and discussion and the excellent idioms and topics the three of you are able to discuss. It's sad that sometimes people are judged harshly simply because of a natural accent based on where they come from or their home language. It might be fun to show them some of the "signature sounds" of Paul Meire's investigations of the "General American English" dialect. If you'd like, I can get you some of that material.

June 27, 2012

Today, I brought in an article about stereotypical personalities in office environments. We read the article and discussed the different types of personalities, experiences we’ve had with people who act like this, and what personality we thought we best fit into. I think they both enjoyed this exercise, but I realized that they are not quite on the same language acquisition level. Svetlana is highly proficient, she speaks only with a very slight accent and her vocabulary is very broad. She also understands and can interpret idioms and slang from context. Aurturo on the other hand has a much thicker accent, is confused by some idioms, and has a more limited vocabulary. Not only did reading the passage help identify for me where they are at more clearly, it also gave me more of a direction to go with. As we read, both Svetlana and Aurturo needed help with pronunciation or reading certain words, and both would ask what some words or phrases meant; the article provided me with material and vocabulary to teach and discuss for both of my tutees. Reading articles this way will help keep each lesson more student centered; we can focus on which words each one needs to learn or pronounce. For future lessons, I plan to continue to provide articles we can all read together and discuss. I hope by providing a variety of topics to discuss, this will keep the interest level high.

June 25, 2012

The second language learners I will be tutoring are Svetlana and Aurturo. Both are highly proficient in academic English as well as conversational English and have asked to be tutored in business language acquisition. Their request was broad, and I was not sure what to focus on. I choose to focus on being a new employee and office relationships. Apparently, this was a very good topic to have chosen. They each came with a personal story about the film “For the Birds” and both stories were about being a new person trying to join into an established group. After each read their story, Aurturo and Svetlana both talked about how it felt to be the new person. This led into the warm-up exercise, in which they both wrote and talked about a time when they began a new job and what they did to make new friends. During these conversations both Aurturo and Svetlana practiced words they may have not used much before. I noticed that I said a few words or phrases, like “office dynamics”, “proprietary information,” and “archetypes”, and that they would use them in their response sentences to me. Unfortunately, this was the only portion of the lesson we were able to finish by 7:40.

June 20, 2012

Meeting our potential tutors during a potluck was an enjoyable experience. The casual atmosphere seemed to set everyone at ease and most of the people I talked to were open and willing to converse. The person I talked to the most was Svetlana. Svetlana is from Russia and is highly proficient in English. She took English in high school, as well as at college, while living in Russia. Svetlana obtained a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, and she continued using English at her job after she graduated. She has been learning and using English over the last seventeen years and can read, write, speak, and understand it. While on vacation, visiting a friend in Vegas, Svetlana met her future husband. She has been living here for the past three years. When at home, during the day when she is alone with them, she speaks Russian to her children, but speaks English to her husband at night. She says she talks occasionally with her neighbors, and feels comfortable speaking English in most circumstances. Svetlana would like to be able to practice her English for job interviews, as well as improve her vocabulary. When I asked her how she would like to practice English, she mentioned practicing job interviews and conversing on the telephone. She wants to be as prepared as possible when she goes back into the job marked, and she’s worried her accent and English may make her less hireable. She said she would like to work on speaking with less of an accent; she feels that people have a hard time understanding what she is saying. However, I thought her accent was very mild, and that she was easy to understand.