Takuya is a Japanese
CIES student, who, after I sent him an email explaining that I was to be his
English tutor, immediately added me on Facebook. We met up at Starbucks,
collected our coffee and began our session with small talk. I was able to get a
handle on what he wanted to work on as well as his level of English.
Like Ivy and Ariel,
Taku thought that he needed to practice speaking the most, followed by reading.
He believed his weaknesses in speaking relied heavily on pronunciation and
situational instances. For reading, Taku told me that he wished to read quicker
with the ability to understand at a quicker pace.
Since this was our
first meeting and he was excited to work on pronunciation, I sifted through his
textbook for the pages on pronunciation. Luckily, I discovered a page full of
poems!
We read a poem,
stanza by stanza, with Taku reading it first so I could hear how he pronounced
specific letters and words that he may have had difficulty with. After each
stanza I would ask him what he thought he read. What did it mean? What was the
main idea? Then, I read the stanza over again so he’d be able to hear how I
read, as well as my inflections.
After
this, Taku would read the stanza once more. During this reading we corrected
pronunciation as well as used context clues to gather meaning and figure out
what difficult words meant. It was as though a light bulb went off. The first
time he figured out a word through context clues, it was a great “Aha!” moment.
He was so proud to have figured out the word and allowed me to feel as though I
had truly given him a skill he’d always be able to use in language learning.
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