I just got back from studying in spain (Bilbao), and for the last month of my summer, before heading back to school, I am going to tutor high school students in Spanish. This is going to be a one on one situation, with students going into their 2, 3, and 4th years of spanish. After studying in Spain, I have every bit of confidence in my spanish ability, yet NONE in my ability to teach it!! Can anybody give me some advice on how to go about this, things to do with them, ANY advice would be great, I start next week and am completely clueless!
Kelly

Welcome home and good luck with the adjustment and culture shock! If you have any specific questions, just ask and I will be happy to help. For beginners, make sure you have copies of the text books they are using to be able to see exactly what they are studying and have studied and should be familiar with...vocab and verb tenses, etc.
Try your best to speak only Spanish to them right from the beginning...don't worry, they will catch on eventually. With the lower level students, have visuals to help you . Reading a short passage and then talking about it is a good ice-breaker. Have them ask questions to you as well as answer your questions. Is it possible to have 2 students at the same time? It works better for conversation practice. You will probably have to do lots of verb drills to help them get comfortable with the tenses.Here is a very good website for grammar practice for the upper levels especially: GREAT GRAMMAR PRACTICE Buena suerte...Esperanza

Kelly,

Don't be too concerned. The first thing that you should do, if possible, is obtain a copy of the textbooks that the high school students are using. This will help you to prepare and see the material that the students are studying.

GET READY. I have worked in high school and with many high school students. SOme teachers tell students that there is only one way to say something in Spanish, which is not true. If a student tells you that his or her teacher said that this is how you say something in Spanish, don't go against it. I did that one day and the student used another word which I gave him and the teacher marked it wrong. So, you have been warned.

Tutoring Spanish is very easy. The textbooks used now are very watered down and it's no wonder why students aren't learning Spanish like they should. Grammar is almost always tossed out of the door.

These are my observations and I know that others will disagree.

Hope this helps.

Shawn

The best thing you can do is get your tutees speaking in Spanish the entire time they're with you. Chances are, in the HS class room, that they get to say about ten words tops each day...that's no way to practice verbal Spanish. By contrast, they're probably asked to write about 50x that much in each session.

Converse with your students and teach them circumlocution, which is talking around a difficult topic or word (ex. they don't know "bombero" but they do know "hombre que echa agua a incendios/fuegos"). DON'T give in to the temptation to speak English to clarify...this deincentiveizes (is that a word?) them to listen knowing that you'll just translate later...

¡Buena suerte!

If you are tutoring these students because they are not doing all that well in Spanish, they will be more interested in bringing their grade up than in speaking Spanish as Cali suggests. Those of us who took to Spanish easily and constantly work on fluency are pretty rare creatures!

If you are helping students who are in a class, I think you must support whatever goes on in class and not introduce new vocabulary or grammar. Whether you agree or like the text is not at all important. Often the student is confused by conjugations and differences like ser/estar, preterite/imperfect and while you can practice them using only Spanish, you may be up against a kid who is totally lost.

For what it's worth, I haven't noticed a huge difference in the amount of grammar covered in the first year of Spanish since I started teaching it in 1968. In fact, MY textbook, El Camino Real (1950+) didn't even cover much more than we do now (I recently checked because I was CERTAIN that I had moved a lot faster than my students do now)...and that involved mostly reading and translating. If you LEARNED Spanish (as opposed to acquired Spanish) then you probably learned in baby steps too.

Yikes!! I had my first session with a couple of these kids yesterday....they were a LOT lower than I had expected them to be. I started talking completely in spanish to them, and they just stared back, LOST . By the end of the session I had figured out that if I slow down, and really water down my speech, they can get the general idea. I was suprised at how hard it was to do this, it took a conscious effort on my part.
These were the 2nd year kids though, so hopefully the 3, 4thh year students will do better today.
Thanks, and keep the great advice coming !