Marzena Siorek
Tutoring Sherry
Day #1
When meeting Sherry first time at the library, I asked her whether she wants me to help her with anything specific. She said her writing is pretty good, as well as she does not have problems with comprehending the material from the content courses, such as biology, chemistry, or physics. Sherry studies molecular biology, and she wants to pursue her Master’s degree at Montclair State University. She is 24 years old, and she came to the United Stated 4 months ago. From our first conversation, I noticed that her vocabulary is very good for someone who has been in this country for 4 months. The student’s grammar is at the intermediate level of second language acquisition, and she constructs syntactically well developed sentences. However, her speech sometimes sounds monotonous because of the problems with pronunciation and punctuation. Sherry has a tendency to form run-on sentences as she speaks. As Dr. Sotillo explains, “run-on sentences are formed because of the learner's inability to form relative clauses”. Sherry sometimes puts together two sentences with separate meaning, such as “I want to be a teacher because I like helping others, and my parents are teachers, and they are in China now”. She constantly uses the phrase “you know” as if she is suggesting me she is having problems with finding advanced vocabulary words, such as the adjective “theoretical” or verb “incorporate”. She does not make a lot of grammatical mistakes when speaking. The only errors I was able to notice when asking her questions were the possessive inflectional morphemes, such as Master degree (correct form Master’s degree), using indefinite articles instead of definite articles, as well as using the masculine pronoun instead of feminine pronoun. However, it is important to note that whenever the morphological error occurred (her instead of his, and she instead of he), Sherry automatically corrected it. Moreover, from what I noticed, those errors only occurred when the sentence was complex and required a lot of thinking.
During the first meeting, Sherry asked me whether our group could help her with preparation for a job interview. She wants to get a teacher’s assistant position for undergraduate students. She wants to work at the lab, and help the students with performing the experiments. I asked her a few questions I was able to recall from my personal interview, and she did surprisingly well. She understood all the questions, and she responded right away to most of them. One of the questions Sherry had problems with, was the question on democracy in the classroom. At first, it seemed to me that she was either confused with the meaning of the word, or she had problems with incorporating this word into the context of the sentence. After a few seconds of silence, I explained to her the meaning of the word democracy, and repeated the question. She was then able to come up with the reasonable answer.
When Sherry couldn’t find the appropriate word to answer the question, I gave her a moment to replace the complicated word with another one, and then I gave her the word she needed. When she made grammatical errors, I provided her with corrective feedback. When correcting Sherry, I also provided her with the explicit grammatical instruction. For example, when teaching her when to use indefinite article and when to use definite article, I told sherry that definite “the” needs to be used when she wants to be specific. Therefore, when she talks about herself and says that she is (a) only child, she needs to be specific and use “the”. It is not any child, but it is her. I think that it is important to provide the students with grammatical rules, even if they already know them. By understanding grammar, the students are able to detect their mistakes, and they are able to fix them. From personal experience, I noticed that some teachers provide the students only with a corrective feedback. They often forget to instruct them grammatically. Some students, especially at the beginner or intermediate level, need to understand where their mistakes come from.
Day #2
For our next tutoring session, I printed out some sample questions for the interview. I went over them at home, and highlighted what I thought was important for Sherry to know. Some of the questions included assistant’s responsibilities, providing security rules in the lab, as well as incorporating creativity into the classroom. During the session, I noticed few mistakes: one of them was omitting the preposition “to” when saying “I want to be a teacher”. Another mistake I noticed during that session was the pronunciation of the word university. Instead of saying university, she made the “m” sound - unimersity. I automatically corrected the mistake and asked Sherry to repeat the “v” sound after me couple times. After that, whenever she used the word university within the sentence, she placed the emphasis on the “v” sound which assured me she benefited from my advice. Sherry also seems to have problems with pronouncing “th” -/θ/ in certain words. She says “sink” instead of “think”. When speaking, sometimes, Sherry also drops the last vowel sound, as in the words Biology or America. One of the difficulties Sherry faces is the pronunciation of “r”. When saying for example “of course”, she would pronounce it as “of couse”, where the /r/ retroflex sound is missing. When listening to the pronunciation mistakes, I gave Sherry a feedback and asked to repeat the words after me, as well as I took some notes. After we finished, I gave her my notes and showed the corrections I made when listening to her. I also told Sherry that if she wants any of us to check her homework and essays, she may always contact us and we would be glad to help her and explain the errors.
Sherry asked me how she could improve her vocabulary. I told her that she could try to read books that include not only educational content. In assignment #1, Nora also suggested that learning 10 new words a day may be helpful in acquiring new vocabulary. When talking to Sherry, I also found out that at school she went to in China, English is taught, however, the teachers don’t speak to their students in English. Therefore, the students face difficulties when it comes to a conversation with a native speaker. I think that studying for example Biology with a group of native speakers or working on a project with her friends from the U.S. may help Sherry with practicing American English.
Nora
Day # 3
I began the session with Sherry by discussing what she had already done with Marzena and continued on from there. Sherry was very concerned with pronunciation of words and we discussed which words she seemed to have the most difficulty with; specifically “th” words. I also noticed that she would sometimes have difficulty with certain prepositions. I always gave her corrective feedback and did a lot of recasting. We practiced some sentences that would need different prepositions and she recited them correctly. We continued having our conversation using many different “th” words. We also discussed how to improve her vocabulary and some of the simple exercises that I listed in the first assignment. When Sherry learned that I was already a teacher and had been on countless interviews for teaching assignments she wanted me to role play; giving her some scenarios that involved me being the interviewer and her being the interviewee. We went over the types of questions that might be brought up on an interview. For example, I posed these questions, “What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are?”, “How would you be an asset to this school?”, “Do you think your English will be a hindrance in this job and if so, how would you overcome that?”. We discussed how to answer these questions and how to use a more sophisticated vocabulary to answer the questions. Sherry’s answers were well thought out; she just needed to be more aware of her utterances. Also, when she wasn’t nervous her sentences flowed better. I put her at ease and gave her positive reinforcement by giving her compliments on how well thought out her sentences were. We ended the session with her asking me that as she gets closer to her interview date, could we practice some more questions and answers like we had done during this session.
Jack Niyazov
Day #4
Sherry and I arranged our tutoring session in University Hall. I have spoken to Marzena before tutoring Sherry and she mentioned that Sherry would like to improve her conversational skills. Marzena has mentioned to me that Sherry was mostly concerned with pronunciation and interview that she was going to have later on this semester. One of the things that I have noticed right the wyy was that Sherry miss pronounced endings of simple past tense verbs such as worked (she would say this word with voiced /d/ sound instead of /t/). I explained to her the difference and gave her examples. In addition, I showed her a hint (how to distinguish between /t/, /d/, /id/). I also exlained to her that sound /id/ would be in words that ended in 't" and 'd'.For example visit past tense we pronounce as visited /id/ voiced. For example, I told Sherry to touch her throat while pronouncing words such as 'love --> loved =/d/' and explained that the last consonant which is simple past in most English verbs is (ed), except for irregular verbs, depends on the last consonant whether it is voiced or voiceless. For instance, let's take two words 'move' and 'miss' when we add /ed/ to the verb 'move' to create simple past tense, it is pronounced as voiced because the last consonant /v/ is voiced. When the last consonant of the verb is voiceless, the /ed/ is pronounced as /t/ voiceless. While explaining it to Sherry, I asked her to touch her throat while pronouncing these words and asked her whether she felt any difference and she did tell me that when pronouncing the word 'moved' the throat was vibrating which indicated that the /ed/ sound is going to be voiced. I also explained the difference between sounds in pairs which are (stops) such as /p/ vs. /b/, /k/ vs. /g/, /t/ vs. /d/ that these pairs are alike in tongue position and articulation and the difference between /p/ and /b/ is that /p/ is voiceless and /b/ is voiced. For example,
Articulation Unvoiced Voiced
Pronounced with the lips closed: [p] (pin) [b] (bin)
Pronouned with the tongue near the gums: [t] (ten) [d] (den)
Pronounced with the back of the tongue against the palate: [k] (con) [ɡ] (gone)
I have also noticed that Sherry has difficulty pronouncing 'th' sound which can be = /θ/ again voiceless and /ð/ voiced. She says sink instead of think and in my opinion I think that Sherry will improve her pronunciation skills very soon because one of the important things for L2 learner is to recognize his/her errors and sometimes it's very difficult to even admit those errors made by L2 learners, but Sherry is able to recognize her errors and she tries not to make them again (but I know it's very difficult for L2 learners especially from China, Japan, Korea and other Asian countries to master this kind of barrier because of the difference of articulation and sounds in English that Chinese doesn't have (ex. "th" as in Think), but I would say that Sherry is an exception because I have tutored at least over 300 students from Asia for the past six years and based on Sherry's knowledge I am positive about her future improvement that she will succeed).
We also discussed some questions about the interview and I suggested that she needs to be more positive about her English skills because Sherry told me that she was going to say on her interview that her English is poor and I said not to do so because sometimes when a child does something silly his mom would say something like "oh my son is a trouble maker and others will probably say "oh no it's not true - your son is a good boy," but if you, Sherry, say during interview that your language is poor while trying to get into a particular position, they might likely think that if you think of yourself that way then why should we think any better of you and they might try to hire someone else instead. I told her to be more positive, optimistic, and confident about yourself and even though your English vocabulary needs a little improvement (due to being in USA only for four months) it doesn't mean that it is either poor or bad. I also gave her compliments on her knowledge of English (based on being in USA only for several months which is amazing). I told her that if she keeps learning the language everywhere she will improve her skills quickly. For example, I suggested Sherry to improve her English skills by not only reading but also speaking English to native speakers (as much as possible), writing or rewriting some paragraphs to improve memory and learn new vocabulary, watching TV (pick your favorite movie or show on DVD and watch it as many times as it takes in order to be able to understand 100% of that particular movie/show - pay attention to pronunciation pause and repeat and if a new word appears that you don't know you can refer to an English-English dictionary and only the last (resort) option if you completely do not understand it, translate it with English-Chinese dictionary), including reading, and try to communicate only in English with your friends who speak your native language. I also suggested to practice pronouncing different words by looking in the mirror and try to remember the position of the tongue, jaw, teeth, lips, etc. Doing all these things will help you improve not only your pronunciation but also vocabulary, syntactic structure, as well as phonological aspects. Second language acquisition, or sequential language acquisition, is learning a second language after a first language is already established. Many times this happens when a child who speaks a language other than English goes to school for the first time. Children have an easier time learning a second language, but anyone can do it at any age. It takes a lot of practice and it is possible to practice by communicating with your friends in English and/or watching TV.
There are many different dialects of native speakers of English such as British English, Australian English, Indian English, etc. Sherry needs practice with American English and I agree with Marzena's proposition that Sherry would improve her skills by "studying for example Biology with a group of native speakers or working on a project with her friends from the U.S. may help Sherry with practicing American English."
I would like to meet Sherry once again before semester ends and help her with some other questions regarding English that she might have.
Pei-Ling Leu
Day # 5
I met with Sherry after she had met all of the group members in our group. We were just having conversations on what she thinks of the whole tutoring session went. She definitely improved her English from having conversations with her from her tutoring. She enjoyed the tutoring and she told me that she would definitely want something like this again. Since she thinks she did not have really anything else in mind that she wanted to be tutored because she already got her tutoring sessions from Marzena, Nora and Jack; she told me that we could just worke on speaking. She wanted to see the conversations we had there are as normal compares to other Americans conversations.
When we started talking, she would still constantly use the phrase “you know”, and “and then”. Even though, I kept telling her that in normal conversation you would not say that many “you know” and “and then”, and she knows that she kept doing that, she would then watch out and carefully think before she speaks. She also would miss pronouncing some of the vocabularies. Such as "what happened?”, she would say “wha happen?” so it was just missing letters in the vocabularies.
As conversation goes, she actually knows if there is a mistake or mispronounce of the word. Just like Professor Sotillo said, when a L2 learn a language, and they make a mistake, we cannot say you are wrong. We have to approach in a way that will not hurt a L2’s feeling. Overall, our conversation was good and it was normal. She picked up her mistakes and I think she improved very much with her English.
