teaching plans

this is a post specifically about teaching english to Chen Han:

when i first met with him this was the background information i was given:
he is 21, is attending a Pittsburgh Public highschool, and doesn't think his english is good.

given the above information i assumed that since he was in high school he probably had an elementary (at worst) competency in english. that was, unfortunately, wrong. he knew almost no verbs. almost no adjectives. and lord knows, no sentence structure, tenses, pronouns, possesives, etc. i mean the only thing i could think was: WHAT IS HE DOING ALL DAY IN SCHOOL?! and why the hell is the school not helping him!?

well, there was some relief when i realized that they had supplied him with an ESL study book. "good" i thought to myself "i'll just teach out of this book and help clarify if there are any questions." wrong again. the book first of all looks almost identical to my 8th grade Ven Conmigo spanish book, and the text in the book is COMPLETELY in english -- the language he doesn't understand. great.

so for the first week after getting my bearings i selected very few topics from this ESL book that were completely obvious without knowing english and started there. the first week we learned: colors, body parts, clothing, some classroom objects (the standard opening lesson for almost all language learning). but this book is just ridiculous, for instance, in the clothing section, it lacked the word "shoe" and instead only taught "sneaker" it lacked the word "sweater" and "shirt" but instead only listed "sweatshirt". i mean, really. come on.

for the second week of instruction, i had scoured amazon.com and other book sites (as well as checking all the barnes and nobles in pittsburgh) for a chinese/english learners book. there are almost none that i can find. after close to 5 days i came across a chinese/english oxford picture dictionary. that came late in the week, but helped tremendously. i couldn't imagine learning japanese if my JSL book was written completely in japanese. the only problem is that for structural issues, for example subject verb object word order in english, stuff like that isn't going to be listed in a picture dictionary... so that is my biggest obstacle at the moment.

things that i taught during the second week were: food items fruit/vegetables, subject pronouns (I, he, we, they), object pronouns (me, him, her, us), reviewed all clothing, body parts, colors (still a little trouble with "brown" and "black"). it's sooo rewarding because he just definately learned them and worked on them at home. some of the notes that we had made during previous lessons had little chinese kanjis next to them - showing he'd been trying to figure them out on his own. we also learned the word "and" "on" and about 10 verbs! (make, put, push, cut, eat, wash) finally!! some verbs! now we can make sentences ^_^! trust me... it's really really hard to communicate without verbs. oh, we also introduced the concept "not".

during the third week: we reviewed all old material again, reinforced subj/obj pronouns, some use of the word "not" but that was more on the back burner during these lessons, added more verbs (point, raise, put away, take out, write, listen, talk, erase) --obviously out of the first lesson in the picture dictionary book, and did lots of writing and spelling exercises. actually, every week there is at least a little bit of a spelling component, but there seemed to be more sentence practice this week. english vowels are just stupid. they make no sense for a new learner, so while i understand that speaking and writing of a language are completely different, i want to put a good deal of emphasis now on spelling so that it's not completely debilitating in the future. also we went over some basic expressions of greeting and leaving.

now we are in the fourth week: we are learning days of the week, months of the year, times of day (morning, noon, midnight, etc), re-did greetings and expressions (i'm sorry, excuse me, etc), lots of adjectives this week with their opposites (heavy/light, old/new, fast/slow, expensive/cheap, soft/hard, etc ~ about 10 pairs altogether). started introducing possessive pronouns (my/mine, your, his/her, our, etc.), more work on "not". "not" + noun = not a book. "not" + adj = not pink. "not" + verb = do not eat. also, in light of learning calendar phrases, i'm trying to teaching date counters: ex: Nov. 1 = November first, Nov. 16 = Novemebr sixteenth. there's always seeming like there are lots of little things creeping up that i'm like "oh wait... thats actually said like this... " english is very irregular!

as i teach today, i'm planning on doing a lot of review - there's been a lot of material covered so far - and lots of sentence structure/practice today! we'll see how it goes.

if any of you have any suggestions or helpful teaching websites, please let me know!! sank-yuu!