Unfiltered Story #301016

Years ago I met a young girl from Vietnam in an online language forum. Since that time she’s come to regard me as her teacher. Now a senior in High School, she’s decided to major in English in college. I continue to help her with homework and she sends me images of material that she gets stuck on. If you get a chance to tutor someone with your native language, have some patience and give it a try. But I discovered many things about ESL instruction:

Some of the questions can be quite brutal. For example, one assignment was to match different types of networks (computer, transportation, television, neural, and philanthropic among others) with real world examples. In Vietnam, CNN and MTV aren’t well known, so my friend had a problem matching those to “television” and ditto the Gates Foundation to “philanthropic.” She thought Bill Gates, being connected to Microsoft, represented a computer network. Another matching set forced me to re-think the pairs when I noticed the word “centre” and knew it was all Britishisms. It turns out that “tower” and “block” match… but not to this American.

Some of the questions are simply wrong. Multiple choice questions with no valid answer… or multiples. A lot of it depends on the sources so the teachers may not be to blame. More than once I had to tell my friend that vocabulary or grammar in a problem is completely wrong.

Despite the various pitfalls of tutoring this way, the results are rewarding. It’s good to see my young friend doing so well and planning a future.