On 8/30/2020, six members of the Syosset AYLUS (Alan Huang, Jasmine Chen, Leo Cheng, John Trach, Emily Lin and Ryan Leung) team-taught an one-hour and thirty minute class on the subject of English to three 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. We presented the classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” to give a hard reading in the form of a story. We created a Vocab and Character sheet which will help them gain comprehension of the story. The vocab sheet documents vocabulary that is unknown to the students so that they could fill them out for homework. For the Character sheet, as the story goes on, the students will write down relations with other characters and their personalities. During the actual class, we started talking about the context of the story and then moved on to the text. The homework is to read the first chapter.
Based on the feedback of our peer tutors, the classic could have been more engaging to the students and might be too long to be finished within a couple of months. To remedy this situation, one viable solution is to teach jokes. This not only provides a more engaging environment, it also builds up vocab because it allows the student to use new words or to use preexisting words that have different meanings. Another solution is to go back to SAT writing. Although the environment will not be as engaging, it will provide the students with more useful skills like analysis and grammar.
Jasmine Chen and John Thach taught the writing portion today. In this class, teaching students about the basic literary devices, their categories, and their uses was the main objective. The tutors developed a lesson plan teaching the students about the different types of literary devices and providing them with a number of examples, which the students read and were led through. The students were assigned homework to be done over the next week, where they would attempt to write their own examples of literary devices using the provided examples as inspiration. The homework will be checked over by the tutors in the next class. The class was instructed fully in English in an attempt to immerse the students in an English environment.
Ryan and Alan taught the speaking portion today. We first went over the sound and spelling patterns of vowels and consonants, specifically how vowels have 2 pronunciations and certain letters such as q, j and z that would be harder to pronounce for non-native speakers. Then we went over how to connect words between the final consonant with the next word started with a vowel (something native English speakers like to do instead of enunciating and separating each syllable). Due to time limit, we didn’t get to the final part of “Improve Time” when students are encouraged to give a 30 seconds improvised speech on their chosen topics. This lesson could be improved with broader coverage of topics, more practice examples and more time designated to student practice for the future.
Besides improving our teaching plan, we also plan to improve our communication with students. We will strive to create a friendly environment and think from their perspectives to resonate with them better.
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).
