Martin-TS#14

Since the last writing "assignment" worked so well the last session, we did another one the same way this time. My tutee wrote about a recent trip to the beach. I am still puzzled about how to bridge the gap between his excellent speech (he told me all about the trip in great detail) and his, in his own words,"terrible" writing. While he could accurately, and in great detail, tell me about his trip, his writing was very simple. While we talked about the trip for almost 15 minutes, he only wrote about four sentences in 15 minutes while writing. We discussed this, and he said its because he doesn't know the words and such. When I asked him why he didn't try looking them up in a dictionary, or at least attempt spelling (or just ask me as that was what I was here for: linguistic support), he just shrugged and began talking about how much he dislikes writing. There is a huge language gap that has not only been created, but reinforced, through the years, between the ease of speaking and listening and the hard, uphill battle of reading and writing. Mainly, his childhood experiences with reading and writing in his own native language were very negative and not at all rewarding. I feel that most of my tutoring sessions have been forced to address this issue (his aversion to the things he needs and wants to improve- every time we meet, those are the areas he wishes to cover as he is embarrassed about it) more than actually teaching him English language. I believe that he is fully capable of reading and writing at a high level, but unless he can overcome his negative attitude towards the subjects in both of his languages, he will see minimal improvement. I've just been trying to present positive exposure to show him the pleasanter side of written language.