Dennis TS#2

On June 22^nd, I had my first session with my adult tutee Julio, who was eager to be tutored, having been out of ESL classes since the beginning of summer. We met at Lake Ella later in the day, and I asked him many of the questions on the Needs Assessment Questionnaire. He had fair speaking skills and understood a lot of vocabulary, but I acknowledged his limitations in reading, comprehension, and proper grammar and syntax. I could sense that there would be considerable time devoted to unlearning certain language behaviors, such as mispronunciations and the tendency to omit certain articles, and conjunctions. He was very enthusiastic about his studies, and we started off with a grammar worksheet where he would read someone’s answer and write the appropriate question to elicit that answer. With some coaching, he was able to form (mostly) the right questions, but there were still errors and subject-verb disagreements, which we worked through as well. We also worked on some prepositions with an Error Analysis worksheet, wherein he would see an image and decide if the preposition in the sentence was correct or needed to be replaced. Finally, I had him read a little bit from a library book about animals (about 5^th grade reading level), which he also had difficulty with, but it helped me understand where his reading level was. It was another good introductory assessment session, but at the end I felt that some of the materials were actually slightly too difficult for his level. What I decided I was going to focus on would be basic parts of speech, and to encourage him to use grammar properly, especially subject-verb agreement and verb tense consistency.