Teaching Experience

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Indiana State University *

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Linguistics

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Apr 3, 2024

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Morgan Adams Sterling LING 316 November 7, 2023 Teaching Experience For my tutoring of an ESL student, I chose to contact an old friend who says his American name is Zach but goes by Zuriel at home in Vinningen-Schwenningen, Germany. Zach was supposed to a foreign exchange student of my friends but due to covid, never got the chance to come to America and experience our culture. We utilized zoom for our tutoring sessions, focusing mainly on the culture and language of the United States. Zach struggles in understanding the slang and grammatical structure of the English language. From this, I learned more insight on the unique needs and challenges of ESL students. It allowed me to learn more about his cultural background and areas where he required additional support. I realized the importance of creating a supportive and individualized learning environment for ESL learners as they can all vary in their abilities. In my own future teaching, tutoring ESL students has solidified my thought to be flexible and open to adjustments. Developing a safe space and supporting them in all their language attempts can help create a more confident ESL student and benefit us both. During my tutoring, I struggled with staying on track with the plan I had originally before beginning the actual conversations. I am very much a person who sticks to my mental schedule, so getting of track felt uneasy for me. It took me a moment to realize that maybe my plan was not functioning well for my student, and I did not to strictly follow my mental plan. Some topics

and information took longer than I expected, which is completely fine! I could take out less valuable information and focus on what the student was engaged in. Another struggle I faced was along the lines of language barriers and difficulty grasping certain concepts. There were specific words in the English language that have varying meanings that did not make sense for Zach. When trying to break down, Zach asked questions like “oh is that kind of like blank” but I had no idea what word he even said to me or if it was similar. In this case, I had to break it down in different words or just move on completely rather than wasting time on it when it was not that vital to our conversation. A success I’d say I had during my tutoring was increased confidence and self-awareness. By the end of the session, Zach was more comfortable in his English speaking and talked more freely than he had in the beginning. He also corrected himself when he had grammatical errors. His main grammatical errors were simply the structure of his sentences or syntax. About midway through we realized we could utilize the chat section in zoom to counteract some of the language barrier that zoom caused with delays or glitches. Another success I experienced during my teaching was the growth I saw not only within a session, but over the duration of them all. In our last call, Zach used almost complete English with about 85% accuracy, much more than before. As a future teacher, it was exciting to see growth in a student within just a few hours together. Some linguistic issues that Zach showed during our sessions were pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension. His errors in all of these categories varied, having his main errors in grammar and vocabulary. For many words, Zach left out the phoneme [r] and replaced [th] sounds with what sounded like a [z]. He also struggled with coming up with the

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