9/6/2020, six members of the Syosset AYLUS (Alan Huang, Jasmine Chen, Leo Cheng, John Trach, 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. We tried to create a light and undemanding atmosphere while teaching an SAT reading passage. This was accomplished through analyzing a joke at the beginning to enliven the class. Furthermore, the students were required to read an SAT passage, paragraph by paragraph. At the end of each paragraph, each student was asked to give a brief summary of the passage and to review unknown vocabulary words. If the students still had difficulty understanding the passage, an explanation was given in Chinese. After analyzing the passage, the students answered analytic questions regarding the passage. Their homework was to finish the remaining questions by the next class.
In the speaking section, Ryan Leung and Alan Huang started with a discussion of the importance of stressing syllables. Unlike monosyllabic Chinese characters, the patterns of stress for words with multiple syllables in English help listeners to identify the words they hear. Then we went over the three symbols of syllable stress: length, pitch, and vowel clarity, and practiced with examples. Towards the end, we read an article, “Why English is so hard to learn” in which multiple examples of homonyms were explained and practiced.
Jasmine Chen and John Thach taught the writing portion. Both our lesson plan and the overall class objective were shifted from the first time based on feedback from students. The classes were previously deemed too difficult, so we scaled back and returned to the basics: English grammar rules. This week, the tutors developed a lesson plan teaching the students about the basics of how a complete sentence is crafted in English, then gave the students an intermediate ESL vocabulary list based on the overall theme of food. At the end of class, a short vocabulary game was played. The class was instructed fully in English to immerse the students in an English environment.
We played another word game together to wrap up the last 10 minutes of class– skribbl.io, a drawing game that utilized the vocabulary list provided by the writing partition of class. We had a lot of fun, and the class ended with lots of laughs.
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).
On