Blending Learning

I attended a workshop at the recent ESL teacher's conference on blending learning (classroom, computer based, on-line) and considered how this could benefit tutored learners.  Most of our tutors and learners use email and it's a skill newcomers need to do well but often find difficult.  An email conversation is great practice for your learner.  As well, you can assign homework or provide links to web-sites that will help them.  For example, you could ask your learner to watch a youtube video and write a summary to bring to your next session.  Let me know if you try this and how it goes!

Collective Nouns

Collective nouns are nouns which stand for a group or collection of people or things.  They include words such as audience, class, committee, crew, family, government, group and team.  They are treated as singular, with a singular verb. 

√ The whole family eats supper together.

√ The government is announcing an election soon.

√ He prefers an audience that arrives without expectations.

A common error for English learners is to use the plural verb because the word repesents more than one person.  For example, "My family are going on vacation."  Although these nouns consist of more than one person, the word represents one entity.

Tutor Training Web-sites

Need some new inspiration?  Visit the ESLSAP tutor training companion web-site for great links and ideas.
http://www.mytrainingbc.ca/eslsap/companion/

ALSO, you are encouraged to join http://tutela.ca/  Membership is free and resources extensive.

Why join Tutela?

Join our growing community to:

• Get access to tons of EAL and FSL resources, including learning activities, worksheets, templates, teacher training resources and much more; rate and comment on the resources you have used

• Connect and collaborate with like-minded EAL and FSL professionals and expand your Personal Learning Network (PLN) through public forum and special interest groups

• Suggest and share your own useful resources, whether these are classroom resources, research papers that offer insight into best practices, or policy documents

• Find out and participate in our events or organize and post your own event

• Post jobs. If you are an employer, you can be sure you’ll get immediate responses from a wide selection of qualified candidates in no time.

Your participation and contributions help make Tutela the go-to place for ESL/FSL professionals!

Get out of the Room!

One-to-one tutoring can be quite mobile. Ask your student to take you on a guided tour in English of the neighbourhood you’re meeting in, a store or other public place.  A change of environment is great for refreshing the mind, and there are plenty of topics for language study that you can get just from walking down the street.

 

Conversation Topics

Running out of things to talk about with your learner?  Introducing new topics is great to grow vocabulary, increase fluency and build confidence.  Check out ta great compilation by ESL teachers at
http://iteslj.org/questions/

Ventures Curriculum by Cambridge

The Ventures curriculum is a favourite for Chilliwack's ELSA instructors.  This multi-level, multi-skill ESL program is being used by several of our volunteer tutors as well.  Did you know that your learner can get extra practice on-line?  Check it out at:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/esl/venturesadulted/venturesarcade/index.html

The web-site also has printable samples of each student book and workbook if you would like to consider using this excellent curriculum.  We have a supply of the books at the office and I would be happy to mentor you in a trial lesson!

Writing Instruction

Are you tutoring your learner towards better writing?  Grammar is often a major problem but poor organization and boring choices can also be a challenge.  For inspiration, watch the following great instruction with your learner or assign it for homework.

http://mondoswritingresources.blogspot.jp/

Written Conversation 

Conduct a conversation with your learner but only in written form. Write a question to your student and give him/her the paper to write an answer on. Go back and forth until your learner has had enough! This can be used to get a writing sample to determine needs for planning future sessions.

Journal Writing

Assign weekly reflective writing to your learner.  Suggest a topic for writing his/her thoughts, perhaps on something you discuss during your session – for example, an experience in the past week, description of a place or event, opinion of a current news item, etc. Write a response after each entry in the journal but don’t correct it unless your learner asks you to.  Use other opportunities to mark writing and use the journal to increase writing.  

 

Some of our learners' biggest English need is to improve their writing so they can enter post-secondary options and/or cope in the Canadian workplace and society.  They need to write email, notes to a child's teacher, etc.  But it's not easy!  Spelling, word order, grammar, sentence structure...  One-on-one tutoring can pinpoint the problems and help overcome them.