Making Assumptions about ESL Knowledge

I was tutoring an advanced ESL student today. He's a doctoral student at one of the top universities in the U.S. He asked me to primarily help him with his writing skills. I always focus on the areas my advanced students want to focus on, as opposed to beginning ESL students who need me to guide the directions of our ESL lessons a lot more.

Some small thing came up today about pronunciation. I started talking about the many vowel sounds English has, yet we only have five vowels (sometimes six with the letter "y"). I wrote and said, "a, e, i, o, u." He asked me to repeat the vowels. He said that this was the first time he'd heard a native speaker say the vowels.

I usually try not to make assumptions about what English language learners know or don't know. I'll often ask about something just to make sure. I never thought to ask about something as basic as the vowels. I learned that I still make certain assumptions and need to be even more conscious.

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Limiting Use of Modals with ESL Beginners

I make it a regular practice to teach modals to my intermediate and advanced ESL students. I describe modals as those words that give "feeling" or extra meaning to verbs. I also explain how they can be used to sound generally more polite, especially when making requests.

However, I limit my teaching of modals when I work with beginning ESL students. Although, I may suggest that they memorize certain phrases like, "May I have a cup of coffee."

I'm thinking about modals tonight because I was watching my all-time favorite reality show, "Amazing Race." In short, this is a TV show about pairs of people racing around the world. I love this show because it's yet another way for me to travel vicariously.

Tonight, the teams were in Taiwan. Only one of the teams had a member who spoke "Chinese," so most of the others were stumbling along and looking for help from the locals without speaking the local language. One team member asked for directions by saying to a local, "Would you be able to show us?" The American was obviously trying to be polite by using the modal, "would." However, I thought that a more simple way to say this in English would be something like, "Please, show us," or even, "Could you please show us."

When speaking to beginning English language learners (not necessarily when teaching, but just when communicating), native English speakers need to find a balance between being polite and the use of modals.

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Total Physical Response and ESL

I'm often asked how I can teach beginner ESL students English if I can't speak their language. I tell them about TPR (Total Physical Response). This is a great method to teach beginner ESL students.

TPR for teaching ESL involves the teacher using his or her body to teach English. A simple example would be walking into a classroom and saying "good morning," and using body language to let the ESL students know to also say "good morning."

If I wanted to teach ESL students what "stand up" means, I would stand up and say stand up at the same time.

In short, in TPR the ESL teacher uses his or her body and/or props and the target language at the same time.

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Teaching ESL to the Elderly

The adult ESL students I work with as a private tutor have very specific purposes for improving their English language skills. Usually, the main purpose is to be able to advance in their jobs. This applies to ESL students living and working in the U.S., as well as those who are here for a year or so on a sabbatical (of sorts).

Elderly students who are no longer in the workforce have different needs and different reasons for studying English as a Second Language. In my experience, it's usually to be able to survive in an English speaking society. For whatever reasons, they are recent immigrants who often have not studied English in their home countries.

Doing a Needs Assessment with a student with little or no English language skills is very difficult. Obviously, there are some basic skills that the teacher can start with. I found this great website with information that can help ESL teachers and tutors, and other organizations working with recent immigrants. Here's their site: Coalition of Limited English Speaking Elderly.

Introductions and Goodbyes

When I teach beginning ESL students, one of the first lessons I do is on introductions and goodbyes. I usually do this by providing a script to the student. I read the sentences and ask the student to repeat after me. Here's a short sample of an Introduction script for English as a Second Language learners:

A. Hello, Jenny. How are you?
B. Fine, thanks. How are you?
A. I'm fine, thank you.

And a short Goodbye script for ESL learners:

A. Goodbye, Maria. See you tomorrow!
B. Bye bye, James. Have a nice evening.
A. Thanks, you too!
B. Thanks.

It looks pretty basic, but these types of survival scripts can help ESL learners to feel a bit more comfortable in their everyday lives.

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Correcting ESL Beginners’ Pronunciation

As a private ESL tutor, I have the opportunity to give a lot of feedback to my ESL students. Feedback is one of the things students appreciate about private tutoring.

Many of my advanced students have some serious pronunciation problems, although their grammar and other English skills are very good. Many advanced students also specifically want to work on their pronunciation and accent reduction. Teachers in the past haven’t spent much time correcting these problems and my advanced students are now dealing with this issue.

As an ESL teacher, I’m sometimes in a difficult situation with beginning ESL students. It’s often very challenging for students to have the self-confidence to speak when they are just starting to learn English. Constant correction tends to paralyze students. They tend to be afraid to speak because they are afraid of the errors they will make in grammar and pronunciation.

I find that I have to reach a balance of which corrections to make and what feedback to give to my students. I tend to not make too many pronunciation corrections unless I absolutely cannot understand the word. With some issues, such as pronunciation of the past tense, I will spend specific time working on correct (or better) pronunciation.

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ESL Survival Expressions

A few days ago, I wrote some survival questions for beginning ESL students. I’ve also found that due to cultural differences, it’s a good idea to teach ESL speakers a few expressions. Here are a few things I think speakers of other languages should learn right away when they start studying English in the U.S.

1. “Bless You”

This should be said whenever someone sneezes. It doesn’t matter if you know the person sneezing or not. For example, you are sitting on the bus and a stranger next to you sneezes, you should say, “bless you.” Incidentally, this courtesy (and cultural norm) doesn’t just apply to ESL speakers. Everyone should say this when another person nearby sneezes. Of course, there is that awkward situation that we all have when someone sneezes three, four, five, etc. times. That's something even native-English speakers have trouble with. When someone says “bless you,” the appropriate response is “thank you.”

2. “Thank you”

Culturally, American native-English speakers probably say “thank you” more than any other people on the planet. I’ve been told by some ESL students that we seem disingenuous with all the “thank yous” we say. We can’t help it! For the vast majority of us, we really do mean it! We’ve been brought up to say thank you for everything. And if we don’t say thank you, we seem rude. If another person doesn’t say “thank you” to us, then we tend to feel the other person is rude. “Thank you” can probably never be said too much by ESL speakers if they want to fit in culturally.

3. “Excuse me”

This is an expression that Americans use for all sorts of things. For example, we can say “excuse me” when we accidentally bump into someone on the bus or if we want to get someone’s attention. We can also say “sorry” when we bump into someone.

4. “Sorry” or “I’m sorry”

Not only is “I’m sorry” a very useful expression for ESL speakers to learn, it would also be more helpful if more Americans used this more often.

Please write to me if you think there are other essential survival expressions for beginning ESL students to know.

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Using Dictation for Listening Comprehension

During my private tutoring ESL tutoring lessons, I can usually tell if my student isn’t able to understand me. I think that listening skills are probably the most difficult for ESL speakers. It seems to speakers of other languages that native-English speakers speak so quickly. I don’t know if we generally speak more quickly than speakers of other languages speak in their native tongues. However, one of the things we do a lot is use reductions (e.g., "I’m going to go to the store" becomes "I’m-gonna-go-ta-tha-store").

One method I use to help beginning speakers with listening skills is dictation. Recently, I was working with a beginning ESL student on the Past Tense. We meet three times a week. After one weekend, (always a good opportunity to practice the Past Tense with “What did you do this weekend?), my student told me about her husband’s father’s birthday. I was able to elicit a fairly decent description of the story.

For our next meeting, I prepared a short summary of the story she told me about her weekend. It read like this:

My Father-in-Law’s Birthday

“Last Sunday was my husband’s father’s birthday. I wanted to cook something special for him. On Saturday, I went to the store to buy groceries to make Bulgogi. I also bought a cake for his birthday.

I was very nervous about cooking for my parents-in-law. I started cooking at nine in the morning. I didn’t finish until five o’clock.

Chris’s parents live in San Bruno. It took forty-five minutes to drive there. We got there at 6pm. We started to eat at 6:30. My parents-in-law loved my Bulgogi. Chris loved it, too.”

I read each paragraph to her a couple of times and let her write as much of it as she could understand. This allowed her to practice her listening and writing skills, and it helped to reinforce the fact that she had effectively communicated her story to me.

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Survival Questions for ESL Beginners

When Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), it's very useful to teach the ESL student some "survival questions."

I always teach my beginning students the following questions. They are useful during our one-on-one tutoring sessions, and more importantly, they are useful in the real world.

(1) Can you repeat that please?

(2) Can you please speak slowly, please?

(3) How do you spell __________?

(4) What does __________ mean?

(5) Can you give me an example?

(6) How do you say ___________ in Japanese/Spanish/French/etc. . . .?

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Present Perfect Exercise Glitch

Today, I met with a beginning level ESL student. Her homework for the weekend included a cloze exercise (a "filling in the blanks" exercise) using the Present Perfect. Before we started correcting the exercise, she asked me if all the blanks were supposed to be filled in using the Present Perfect. I said, "yes." When we started going over the answers, I realized that the exercises actually required using either the Present Perfect or the the Simple Past. Oops.

I apologized profusely to the student for giving her the wrong instructions. However, we were able to make the corrections together and this turned out to be another learning opportunity. I was also able to see her thought processes in determining whether the correct verb tense was the Present Perfect or the Simple Past.

I got the ESL grammar exercise from one of the of the sites that I use regularly for exercises. (I had copied and pasted it to Microsoft Word on my laptop (giving all the appropriate credit to the website).) It said that the exercise was for the Present Perfect. Other exercises specified other tenses, so I made the assumption that the whole exercise labeled "Present Perfect" was only using the Present Perfect.

This is not the first time I discovered an error in an ESL lesson I got from the Internet. Moral of the story: review the exercise before you assign it to your student!

"I am traffic accident"

Any English grammar problems here? There's a subject. There's a verb. We have the makings of a complete sentence. But there may be a problem or two. How about verb choice, verb tense and a missing article?

This is a sentence one of my beginning ESL students wrote for homework. I believe we were working on the past tense of "to be." (It was a couple of weeks ago, so I don't remember for sure.) OK. It was easy enough to correct the grammar problem of the tense used ("am" should be "was"), but that doesn't make the sentence correct either.

Here are possible grammatically correct sentences:

I was in a traffic accident.
I had a traffic accident.

Since this student was a beginner, it was easier (and I hope wiser) to show the correct options with just a little explanation.

Knowing how much to explain (the metalanguage) about a grammar point is often a fine line, or at least an invisible one. Too much explanation causes confusion and the student doesn't learn the point you are trying to make.

Working with advanced ESL learners allows us to use metalanguage to better explain the grammar points. When working with beginning level ESL students, it's often best to just provide correct examples.

I know that my learner finally understood the issues because of the great laugh we were able to have afterwards. She understood what her original sentence meant. And it is kind of funny.

Student Needs Assessment

A Student Needs Assessment (aka Student Needs Analysis) is essential when you are teaching students one-to-one. Completing this process gives you a beginning roadmap to follow for the first couple of lessons with your new student. You'll learn more about the student's needs as you spend time with your student.

I work with adults only. The majority of my students are advanced ESL students, so they are able to tell me the areas they would like to focus on. That doesn't mean I slack off in doing the Needs Assessment. Sometimes the student may not be able to articulate the precise areas they need to improve. They just know that they want to improve their listening skills, for example, but they don't that the problem they are having is identifying reductions commonly used by native English speakers.

I always set up a free first meeting with a potential new student. This allows me to do an English skills Needs Analysis and it also gives the student and me an opportunity to decide if we would like to work together. This meeting takes between an hour and an hour-and-a-half. Of course, for beginning English level students, it takes a lot less time.

Personal Pronouns and the Present Perfect

I met with two students today. One is an advanced ESL learner. I've been working with her for about a year. Much of the grammar we work on is review. Our major focus is conversation skills, accent reduction and pronunciation (mostly medical terms, as she is a Registered Nurse). I noticed some difficulty with Personal Pronouns, so we are reviewing them by using Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar, chapter 8, "Pronouns." My student had some problems with the first exercise (mostly an assessment tool). We proceeded with Section 8-1, Personal Pronouns. This section provides a chart with subject pronouns, object pronouns, possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives. We also practiced identifying antecedents.

I remember having difficulty, myself, with pronouns when I studied Spanish. Memorization of each of the pronouns is necessary. This can be accomplished through written exercises (and sometimes has to be, otherwise, some students try to avoid using pronouns in spoken English) and verbal drills.

The second English language learner I tutored today is at a high beginner level. It's been 10 years since she studied English in high school in Korea. We've been working together for a couple of months. Today's lesson included the Present Perfect. I used Murphy's Basic Grammar in Use, unit 16, "Have you ever...?" I also introduced some new vocabulary phrases dealing with restaurants ("Do you take plastic?" "I'd like a doggy bag," etc.). Homework is to create a dialog between a diner and a server. (I developed this lesson plan a couple of years ago when I was studying for my TESOL certificate.)