ELL Students

I’ve grown up in a mostly English speaking home, alternating from English to Cantonese depending on who I was talking to (my grandmother, who is Hakka, is unable to communicate in English).

It’s so easy for me to take these things for granted – the English language, that is. I’ve had little problems reading, writing, understanding and basically just using the language. Today, at my very first tutoring session with an ESL (English as a Second Language) student, I guess I finally realized that, it really is difficult for certain students to even put together a sentence in English, much less a paragraph or an essay.

I’ve never tutored English before, till now, and my student is hardworking and really eager to learn – I’m totally lying to say that I’m not scared. I asked her to write me 2 essays the previous week and upon reading them today, (there were certain spaces in her essays which she filled with Chinese characters – she didn’t know how to translate her thoughts into written English), I realized that I had taken on a challenge bigger than I had initially given it credit for.

I conducted the entire lesson in Cantonese, mostly not wanting to pressure her into speaking in English at the moment. Her vocabulary is very limited but she could speak english - Manglish, mostly.

I am excited, to teach her, to improve, and learn along with her – but among those positive and optimistic thoughts, buried within are certain worries, fears and anxiousness that I wouldn’t be able to teach her everything I want to. I want her to be able to master the language, am I being too optimistic? Too naive?

I looked through about a dozen websites at 3am this morning, seeking advice on how to teach ESL students and some of the great websites I found are listed below: (you can look if you’re interested for any reason at all)

For more advanced ESL Students:
http://www.rong-chang.com/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/tutor/problems/esl.shtml

For beginner ESL Students:
http://www.bnkst.edu/literacyguide/ell.html

I passed her a Sweet Valley book, a rather simple (and non-threatening) one where they’re still in middle school. I guess, to me, reading is a must if a person wants to improve their written and spoken English.

I have so many thoughts swimming in my head at the moment – I really appreciate any feedback at all on how to improve or make my one- on-one tutoring lessons more effective.