One to One Lessons

A diagram of the articulators used to pronounce the letters b and v

One of the most rewarding assignments for the Trinity College Certificate in TESOL course at Sheffield Hallam University was my work with César Santin Bejarano, from Ecuador. The main purpose of this exercise was to examine in some depth the linguistic achievements and difficulties of an English learner, by analysing their speaking, writing, reading and listening skills during four meetings, which culminated in a 45 minute one to one lesson.

César Santin Bejarano

I chose César because I had, by this time, decided to do something really different in my life and had booked a flight to Paraguay, and I was interested in learning more about life in South America and the Castillian language that is spoken in most countries there.

During our first informal meeting over coffee, at The Forum in Sheffield, we talked for more than 2 hours and he told me about his background and motivation for learning English. We discussed environmental conservation, climate change, volcanoes, the pronunciation of the letters c, s, z, j, g and v in English and Castillian - in South America and Spain -  and a variety of other topics.

The Bear Pit at Sheffield Botanical Gardens

In the next two lessons, which were recorded, I used an article from The Independent, which described life on the island of Montserrat, to test his reading skills and, for the listening, an extract from Michael Palin’s Full Circle from South America. 

César has interests in the Ecuadorian tourist industry and has qualifications that enabled him to work as a tour guide in the Galapagos Islands, so I had confidence in his ability to understand the material that I had prepared for him.

An exercise for the pronunciation of the letter v

As part of my preparation for this assignment, I undertook research on the problems that Castillian speakers have when learning English, especially with their pronunciation. In our first meeting, César told me that he had problems being understood by his mainly Polish colleagues at work, where he fabricated steel fences. A simple exercise using a cigarette lighter and a short list of similar words for practice worked wonders and César quickly learned how to say 'volcano' with the correct pronunciation of the letter v.