Journal Notes:

I am at my 5th or 6th week with my student and seeing progress. I can tell if he has studied in between lessons.

Currently these are my scores for the evaluation process for his aptitude (I have no formal training, or curriculum that I am going through, so this is my own program):

Reading: 3
Writing: 3
Speech: 3
Comprehension: 4
Desire To Learn: 9

This week I noticed that instead of trying to sound out a word, he would attempt to guess what the word was, so I had him review the letter sounds of his ABC’s. Ak! He only got 16 correct. So in light of that his reading was very good. So now we are going to back track and make sure he knows his letter sounds.

He has a good foundation thanks to the English language school, so I think we can see some progress in about 16 weeks.

I also have been working on his vocabulary injecting 5 very relevant words a week that come up in the course of the instruction. He is adding to vocabulary on his own as we practice reading by writing down a list of any words he does not know.

He is still not quite understanding that I am wanting him to use his vocabulary words in sentences, to build his conversational English skills.

This week I added some slang terms “What’s up?”, “Cool”, “Hey, man” & “How’s it going?” to the list. It took him awhile to understand what “slang” was but once he got it, he thought it was fun and got engaged. I felt it important for his safety to understand what curse words were, I think he knew some of them. That was fun. (not really)

My student paid me a compliment this week in saying that he learned more with me in one hour then a whole week in his English classes. At first I was feeling pretty good about that, but in hindsight I realized that it just means I am doing my job adequately, for that is about the right ratio for private tutoring. (In which I have no previous experience. Other than maybe some guitar lessons and on the job training sessions.)

My student does not speak Karen, and speaks Burmese. My last student spoke Karenni, so I am not having the opportunity to pick up much Karen, and attempting to learn three languages from different students is difficult.