ESOL Tutoring at Clarke Central

My SPAN4090 service-learning project was tutoring ESOL students at Clarke Central High School a few times a week during their ESOL class from 8:25-9:55 AM. My job consisted of helping students with their classwork and homework for their English classes. I answered any questions they had about these assignments and worked with them one on one on their speaking, writing, and reading comprehension skills. The ability levels of the students were very different, however I found that they all shared that same desire to learn. Some students came from their native countries with a very good educational background while others came with very little previous education. The different competencies of the students proved to be a challenge to me when it came to choosing the best method to teach the tasks at hand.

With some students who were quite advanced in their English skills, I often used tutoring techniques that involved asking questions that made them think further about the topic and come up with the answer on their own. If they asked me what a word meant, we thought about the context of the reading and then looked the word up in the dictionary. We then came up with a way to remember what that word meant. With other students that had much lower English proficiency, it was more difficult to find ways for them to learn the material. A few of the students lacked basic reading and writing skills in their native language, Spanish. This made it very hard for them to learn English. I mainly tried to help them come up with tricks that would help them remember the material. I feel that the main way that I could help these students as a tutor was to give them the confidence to want to learn and participate in class.

Volunteering in an ESOL class, although the class was relatively small, I noticed that it was hard for the teacher to cater to all of the individual needs of each student. Making a lesson plan that can work for such varying levels of English proficiency can prove nearly impossible which is why I think it was good to give each student one-on-one help. My experience at Clarke Central was a very gratifying one in which I was able to see improvement in their English skills and confidence over the semester. It was a great experience and hopefully I will be able to continue volunteering with these students next semester.