On 10/4/2020, six members of the Syosset AYLUS (Alan Huang, Jasmine Chen, Leo Cheng, John Thach, Ryan Leung and Emily Lin) taught a ninety-minute English class to multiple newly immigrated high school students with varying degrees of proficiency in English.
The lesson consisted of three parts: reading, writing, and speaking.
Leo Cheng and Emily Lin taught the reading portion of the eighth ESL Tutoring class. To maintain the light mood during class, we continued telling a joke and analyzing it at the beginning of class and explained in Chinese if they didn’t understand. Since we started “Harrison Bergeron” last week, we continued reading where we left off. We also went over what their opinion was of the part of the short story they read last week. While reading the story, we typed words they had trouble with into the chat on Zoom for them to look back to and went over the pronunciation and definition of the words. Due to the time limit, we did not get to finish the story during class. Therefore, for homework, the students were to finish reading the last page or so.
Alan Huang and Ryan Leung taught the use of emphasizing certain words in a sentence to alter the meaning of the sentence. For example, in the sentence “I’m going to make dinner for my family”, each different word that is emphasized changes the meaning of the sentence. For example, when the “going” is stressed, the sentence implies that the speaker will make dinner later in the future. When the “my” is stressed the speaker is implying that they are making dinner only for their family and no one else’s family. At the end of the class we played a game where we took turns saying one word each and making a sentence. We then had the students identify the content words in the sentence we made. We also taught the students about the five types of function words: articles (a, the, an), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (below, on, above), pronouns (he, she, they) and auxiliary verbs (can, must, might, will).
Jasmine Chen and John Thach taught the writing portion. They reviewed independent and dependent clauses and learned more about direct and indirect objects in sentences. Students were taught the definitions of each grammar rule and then asked to create their own sentences with the rules they learned. Later, students were led through a vocabulary sheet based around the topic of “Instruments” and practiced pronouncing challenging words. After the lesson, the tutors and students continued a game of “would you rather” from the last class. The class was instructed in English to immerse the students in an English environment.
The following 6 students volunteered in today’s tutoring program: Alan Huang (1.5 hours), Jasmine Chen (1.5 hours), John Trach (1.5 hours), Leo Cheng (1.5 hours), Emily Lin(1.5 hours) and Ryan Leung (1.5 hours).
