Teaching English
One of the things that's been a bit weird is that, since starting teaching experience, it caused the cleaner to ask me for English lessons. So now, every week on Monday mornings, I teach her English.
I have no EFL/EAL (English as a Foreign/Additional Language) qualifications, nor are languages my primary skill (although, at school, I wasn't bad at them either). So part of me is wondering what the hell I'm doing this for. I made it clear to her that I don't possess these skills and that I wasn't sure what I could do for her. However, she still wanted to go ahead and, after one free lesson, she said she liked what I was doing, so we've carried on. We've completed lesson three today.
Although she's happy, I still have reservations. I don't know if what I'm doing is right, or good value for her. I feel a bit immoral, sometimes, in the sense that I feel I'm taking her money for something that isn't proper and I'm learning just as much as she is, in many regards, about how to teach languages. I often feel that I've thrown myself in the deep end too rapidly and now I have to make do.
But, she's had proper language tuition. She knows what being in a proper language school is like, and she knows that's not what I'm doing. What she seems to lack is experience, confidence and context. In that regard, this is a lot less like teaching and a bit more like counselling. She knows all the language stuff, in some shape or form, she just doesn't apply it. I give her a safe space to do that, and for that I really do deserve the money, I think.
Additionally, she lives in England now and has been here for a while. She's picked up too much for the standard lessons, with their regimented and separated topics in order, to work on her. I get the feeling that any proper tuition would be redundant about half the time and fail to prepare her for life outside the classroom, which is the real aim of the exercise.
Also, I do have a Polish A-level and I'm a native speaker of both languages to high level. Although I can't teach Polish, because I'm not really culturally Polish, I am culturally English. I don't necessarily know how to speak English, I just do. Added to the Latin and French I studied, which gave me a rudimentary grasp of grammar, and I have just enough to do what I need to do.
So, what I'm trying to do is give her a good example of how to speak English. I let her try to speak it with me, and just by speaking it, she exercises herself and hears me speaking it properly, so she subconsciously learns good pronunciation. She can also ask me the meaning of words and I can usually translate them (if there is a direct translation). At the moment, when we're not learning, we converse mainly in Polish, mixed with English (because my Polish is rusty enough that I need to dip into English to make myself understood), and I'd like to move that increasingly to English.
Another major component is reading. She not only needs to know how to speak English, but she needs a wide and varied vocabulary and she needs to absorb enough English culture and ways of expression in order to understand not what the words mean, but what's being said. In short, she needs to start thinking in English. Books are the way to go on this one. So, one of the things I've done is I've picked a children's book that is developed enough to hold her attention. I picked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Rould Dahl. We're going through that now, bit by bit. It also allows me to use my skills as a reading helper, as the skill-set is much the same for adults and for children.
I supplement this with bits of proper grammar teaching. So we're working on the definite and indefinite article, which all Polish people find hard to grasp (even my mother, after many years here, still has a tendency to shower a's and the's into a sentence in no particular order, although she writes very well).
I also get her to write things for homework, although this week, I gave her a prod into listening/watching English programmes by setting her a homework to watch/listen to something and tell me about it.
I have no EFL/EAL (English as a Foreign/Additional Language) qualifications, nor are languages my primary skill (although, at school, I wasn't bad at them either). So part of me is wondering what the hell I'm doing this for. I made it clear to her that I don't possess these skills and that I wasn't sure what I could do for her. However, she still wanted to go ahead and, after one free lesson, she said she liked what I was doing, so we've carried on. We've completed lesson three today.
Although she's happy, I still have reservations. I don't know if what I'm doing is right, or good value for her. I feel a bit immoral, sometimes, in the sense that I feel I'm taking her money for something that isn't proper and I'm learning just as much as she is, in many regards, about how to teach languages. I often feel that I've thrown myself in the deep end too rapidly and now I have to make do.
But, she's had proper language tuition. She knows what being in a proper language school is like, and she knows that's not what I'm doing. What she seems to lack is experience, confidence and context. In that regard, this is a lot less like teaching and a bit more like counselling. She knows all the language stuff, in some shape or form, she just doesn't apply it. I give her a safe space to do that, and for that I really do deserve the money, I think.
Additionally, she lives in England now and has been here for a while. She's picked up too much for the standard lessons, with their regimented and separated topics in order, to work on her. I get the feeling that any proper tuition would be redundant about half the time and fail to prepare her for life outside the classroom, which is the real aim of the exercise.
Also, I do have a Polish A-level and I'm a native speaker of both languages to high level. Although I can't teach Polish, because I'm not really culturally Polish, I am culturally English. I don't necessarily know how to speak English, I just do. Added to the Latin and French I studied, which gave me a rudimentary grasp of grammar, and I have just enough to do what I need to do.
So, what I'm trying to do is give her a good example of how to speak English. I let her try to speak it with me, and just by speaking it, she exercises herself and hears me speaking it properly, so she subconsciously learns good pronunciation. She can also ask me the meaning of words and I can usually translate them (if there is a direct translation). At the moment, when we're not learning, we converse mainly in Polish, mixed with English (because my Polish is rusty enough that I need to dip into English to make myself understood), and I'd like to move that increasingly to English.
Another major component is reading. She not only needs to know how to speak English, but she needs a wide and varied vocabulary and she needs to absorb enough English culture and ways of expression in order to understand not what the words mean, but what's being said. In short, she needs to start thinking in English. Books are the way to go on this one. So, one of the things I've done is I've picked a children's book that is developed enough to hold her attention. I picked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Rould Dahl. We're going through that now, bit by bit. It also allows me to use my skills as a reading helper, as the skill-set is much the same for adults and for children.
I supplement this with bits of proper grammar teaching. So we're working on the definite and indefinite article, which all Polish people find hard to grasp (even my mother, after many years here, still has a tendency to shower a's and the's into a sentence in no particular order, although she writes very well).
I also get her to write things for homework, although this week, I gave her a prod into listening/watching English programmes by setting her a homework to watch/listen to something and tell me about it.