One to One ESL English Language Tutoring

ESL teachers talk about "One to One ESL English Language Tutoring"

Sometimes the success of one-on-one tutoring depends on the work that a student puts into practice *between* tutoring sessions.

Some years ago, I had a Chinese engineer who was essentially almost incomprehensible even to me, with all my experience of decoding foreign accents. He had all the typical Chinese mispronunciation patterns in the extreme.

This was the case even though he had completed an MA degree at a US university, so had been exposed to English for several years before I saw him as a student.

He recorded each lesson and practiced with it between our weekly tutoring sessions. He also recorded himself while he was talking on the phone, and we worked with the types of things that he had been able to master when focused on pronunciation, but then re-emerged when he was not thinking about them.

We would often record the very beginning of our lesson while we were engaged in regular conversation and then use that recorded segment and the pronunciation problems that turned up in it as the basis for that day's lesson.

With the right tutor, and with sufficient motivation on the student's part to practice rigorously between tutoring sessions one-on-one tutoring can be very beneficial for pronunciation.

*********

I found one-on-one tutoring to be very helpful for increasing speaking fluency, including pronunciation and intonation for several visiting Chinese profesors.

Since they have different goals and needs from my immigrant students, I have put them with tutors in the classroom, and have seen their listening and speaking fluency increase markedly in one quarter (12 hours a week for 11 weeks).

These students came with great reading and writing skills and more grammar than most American college students, but they could barely speak a word.

I had the tutors using conversational fluency activities with the students (one-on-one) and helping them with vocabulary, idioms, pronunciation and intonation.

The daily practice of speaking English for several hours at a stretch with corrective feedback has made a dramatic difference.