Panama Update #49
September 18, 2008
One of my goals since coming to Panama was to write everyday. If I do that, study some Spanish, and read in English a little, then I feel like I have had a productive day. I haven't written in this blog everyday, but at least 4 to 5 times a week. Sometimes I think there is nothing to say that anyone would find interesting enough to read, but I plan to continue to write for the practice. Today I had an ESL (English as a Second Language) tutoring session from 7:30-8:30. It is with a native Panamanian woman who works here as a biology lab assistant. She is trying to raise her skills high enough to do well on the TOEFL (college entrance test for ESL students) so one day she could be admitted into a US university. We cover several different areas. For reading comprehension I copy magazine articles off the internet that are science related and about the same level of difficulty as the TOEFL. She reads it and I correct her pronunciation as she reads. After each paragraph or so she stops and I ask her questions to check her comprehension. In this way she also gets conversation practice. I find it an effective method for learning the language and it also seems interesting to the students, especially if I find articles that interest them. I also have some textbooks that I brought with me that have a lot of listening exercises. I read sentences that have a grammar mistake, or not. If there is a mistake the students tries to give the correction. Another exercise I do is to read a paragraph at a medium to high speed and then ask the students questions about comprehension. Of course this all varies by the level of the student and what they want to study. If a student wants to study writing, then I assign an essay topic taken from the internet site of TOEFL and check it over with the student the following lesson. We may end up doing several revisions if the student can stick with it. But in the end, the overwhelming thing that most students want to do is practice conversation. So whatever lesson we are doing, I always like to take time for that.
