Not Fast Enough

Below my response to a tutor's monthly report. She expressed some concerns about how her learner was not learning fast enough and having trouble doing worksheets for homework.  

I wanted to reply to your feedback as soon as I read it. It has been four months since you and H. got started.  Let me see if I can summarize your concerns and try to address them in some kind of coherent order.

1. Linda is not learning fast enough
2. It’s hard to get her to converse in English
3.  Explaining the exercises in English takes extra time, when you can do it in Spanish.
4. She may need easier assignments to do for homework. Audio resources may help because her vision is poor.

Well, one thing seems clear. You’ve gotten to know her pretty well in the time you’ve had together. I think you can be happy with the fact that she is working hard and trying faithfully to learn...Language learning is usually slow, there’s not much getting around that. The fact that she’s actively trying to do the work you give her is wonderful news.

                I might be able to answer several of your concerns...with one suggestion.  Given that she is not a quick learner, that explaining things is tough and that you were thinking about audio resources, why don’t you give her audio homework? Here is a place where you can find songs with accompanying videos and lyrics:  http://www.esolcourses.com/topics/learn-english-with-songs.html.  If you look across the top of the webpage you will see that you can choose songs from three lists—Easy, Medium and Hard. In the Medium category I heard the very slow-singing Rufus Wainwright version of John Lennon’s “Across the Universe”  Here’s a link to that, by the way: http://www.esolcourses.com/content/topics/songs/rufus-wainwright/across-the-universe.html

                You could think in terms of “easier or harder” assignments, but maybe the better question concerns appropriateness to her learning style. The academic approach—textbooks and worksheets—works for some. But most learners at LitNet don’t come from an academic background and mindset. It occurs to me that you could structure conversation around the Wainwright song.  Ask her to listen to the song and use her dictionary to look up one or two phrases that may have confused her, then try to bring what she learned to your next lesson. Ask her to think of how the song made her feel, and what it made her think of.  Again, she could look up the words for those feelings and then try to talk to you about them using new vocabulary.  Having an emotional content helps many learners process new language skills.

                In addition, you can also assign worksheets. You don’t have to stop doing that. It’s great that you’re assigning homework and she’s trying to do it.  Here is a link to where you might find some worksheets:  www.delicious.com/literacy_network/worksheets. One of the sites there had some worksheets on various topics, including count/non-count nouns, for example: http://englishforeveryone.org/PDFs/Count_and_Non-Count.pdf. 

Thanks for being someone’s tutor

Musical Homework

How to give homework that can expose your learner to English between lessons? Now that is one persistent question. We want our learners to get practice, but their busy lives leave little opportunity to do worksheets, write essays or do anything else that requires academic rigor. Tutors and teachers have to find assignments that can be done in the background, while other work is going on. That is the reason I suggest assigning songs as homework.
The specific idea came up in the middle of a tutor training. A new trainee, Carlos Lewinson, suggested assigning one song to listen to, which made me think, "Hey, good idea," because it harked back to an experience I had. A supergroup called Los Super Seven perform a song called, "El Canoero." That Mexican folk song came in a CD with the Spanish and English lyrics side by side. Its haunting melody and driving rhythm kept me wanting to hear the song again and again. Through repetition I learned phrases from its lyrics, "Yo soy el canoero que rema y rema y rema y rema." [I am the canoeist who rows and rows and rows and rows.] Most of my conversations in Spanish do not concern rowing, but the other verbs I learned in the romantic song - darle [to give her], buscando [searching], encuentro [i find] - were very useful.

So find a good song. By "good" I mean a song where someone sings with clear diction and at a reasonable pace. So, the Rolling Stones are a pretty poor choice, as is REM. Ozzy Osbourne is right out. But Executive Director Jeff Burkhart suggested the ever-mellow James Taylor as a good source. You can find his lyrics at www.jamestaylor.com, as well as a limited number of songs and videos. "You've Got a Friend" is perfect. "Steamroller Blues" is more risqué but very catchy. Another slowish, clear singer is Billy Joel, whose site is www.billyjoel.com. "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" is a nice song with a simple narrative. You can also search lyrics by artist at the site Lyrics Zoo.

Before you introduce the song, look over the lyrics. You may need to pre-teach any vocabulary that could be confusing. For instance, in "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" there is the line, "A bottle of red, a bottle of white. It all depends upon your appetite." You can explain that he means red and white wine and the meaning of the phrase "it depends on ___" using simple English. Music is a great way to learn idioms.

You may need to lend a CD, or possibly make a copy to give your learner--a modest investment. But if the song keeps playing in their mind--if you can infect them with a songworm--the English lyrics will be repeating themselves between lessons. Yes, tutors, English is an infectious disease. And we are the vectors.

P.S. Tutor Brett Rohlwing had this to add shortly after reading my message:

Another fun song I have used with my learners is the Barenaked Ladies classic "If I Had $1,000,000" which has pretty clear lyrics and is easy to understand. I've used it for explaining the use of subjunctive and the verb "would"-- like, "I would buy you a house" etc. It's also fun explaining some of the jokes and word-plays in the song, like "If I had a million dollars, I would buy you some art- a Picasso or a Garfunkel"

Editor's note: The same subjunctive idea works with the stately song, "If I Had a Hammer" by Pete Seeger