Hello again, 

  Glad that you are still following my weekly (well, almost) journal about linguistic. In this entry, I would like to talk about something that happened last weekend, my first ever experience as an English tutor. 

  So ever since I got into college, earning some extra cash has been one of my goals as my spending are way too much for my wallet to cover most of the time. And earning money with the language which I am somewhat good at is my top priority for the goal. And in my freshman year I hadn't had the opportunity much aside from one time when I helped a professor drew some comics for her English teaching project. And at the end of August this year (just before entering my Sophomore year), I applied for a tutor website which you can pretty much advertise for anything you think that you are good at and can be a tutor of. So, without any doubts, I confidently put in English as my subject and hoped to find an opportunity right on. 

  And fortunately my wish finally came true after waiting for several months. And my student was a first grader in senior high school and she was already taking English cram school at the time. The main problems that her parents and she wanted for me to solve was her vocabularies problem. She often got very low score on her test because she couldn't spell out the correct spellings or because she often doesn't know what to put in the blanks in some questions . And she couldn't find a way to break through this problem. She also couldn't memorize the words for a long time. 

  And before actually teaching her, I decided to do some preparation to help solve her problems. So, with the help of my friend, who has been tutor for quite some time, we broken down her poor English vocabulary ability into two possible reasons out of our own assumptions. Number one may be because that she didn't fundamentally understand what the true meanings of the words she's learning. This may explain why she didn't know what to choose in the "fill in the blanks" questions. A single word may have many meanings, or the direct Chinese translation of the word doesn't exactly match up to the English meaning. If students failed to understand that, he or she would have a hard time picking the right words. 

  The number two reason for her not efficiently memorizing words may be because she couldn't correctly pronounce them. For me and my girlfriend, who also studied English a ton, knowing how to pronounce words significantly helped us spell them out, as some hints may be provided when you know how to say them. And for that to happen, students need to have a solid understanding of phonics, which is the principle for pronunciation. 

  After doing some preparation and gathering some material for the class session, I was ready to take on my first class. But for how did the session go, that would be in my next entry. See you soon! 

10/30/2020