TEACHING AMERICAN CHILDREN - A NOVEL EXPERIENCE

TEACHING AMERICAN STUDENTS - A NOVEL EXPERIENCE

It is very true that there is a heavy demand for English "tutors" in US and it is also a bitter truth that the youngest of Children of US are desperately in need of a good teacher who could teach them "standard American English" (Exactly the phrase that is used in all their TestPrep EXams). of course it is quite common that they have a very heavy "accent "and use a lot of slang words which puts the tutor on the hook. Ironically when the subject area comes the situation is vice versa. Even at ninth grade level we "tutors" come across students who cannot just read what is written on the white board.

I think I should speak about the nuances of teaching American students in a seprate article. When I first started teaching ,nearly for a fortnight I got students who had asked for "help" in Grammar and in grammar Subject verb agreement, Verb, Noun, Prepositions, Simple Reading, Reading Comprehension, Essay writing and above all Vocabulary. This actually made me think. Initially even I was firtst groping in darkness without knowing what exactly I should teach when the student asks me to teach "Reading" and "Reading Comprehension" or " Essay Wriiting".

To be frank and honest I think I nearly wasted about a fortnight without actually realizing what should I teach and then comes how I should teach. Around that time I was asked to take a SAT diagnostic test to test my ability to be a TestPrep ( high profile exams) tutor and that was really an eye opener to me. SAT exam consists of Sentence Correction, Sentence Improvement, ESsay writing, Critical Reading - just have a look at all these chapters you can easily correlate why from a first grade child fills in the topic "essay writing".

Right from first grade the child is groomed to face the SAT exam the only passport for the student to enter into the college of his choice and the subject the student wants. That is precisely the reason why students never pay much attention to text books or come to "tutors" for help in their text books. They have to be thorough with Vocabulary to score in "Critical Reading" section. They have to be thorough with "prepositions" to score in "Sentence Correction" and should be thorough in grammar as a whole including "misplaced modifiers" (even a fifth grade child comes with the topic "misplaced modifiers") - they would even prefer to learn ordinary Verbs and Nouns from us since they want their fundamentals to be very strong because SAT exams really saps their energy off.