I have 3 tutees, Hamad, a young man from Kuwait, and two young Chinese girls, Binshan Fan and Linxi Deng. All three of them are students in the Speaking class that I TA in with Alex Ramos. I asked them to all meet me at the same time as I was under the impression that this was supposed to a group tutoring session.
Our first meeting together on Tuesday started out with a limp: Hamad was there, but the two Chinese girls couldn't be located anywhere. Much later I learned that they had become confused because I did not attend Alex's Speaking class that day due to a minor emergency. (In order to not fall behind, I had them fill out the Needs Analysis worksheet the following day while Alex was setting up for her class.)
I gave Hamad the New Tutee Needs Analysis sheet that I had put together for Ramin's class. He wasn't sure why he needed to fill this out until I improvised by saying it was a "requirement" from Ramin and it's purpose was to help me as student teacher. We spent about 15 minutes going over each question on the sheet and discussing Hamad's answers and what he thought he needed the most help with. Hamad answered that he thought his two weakest skills were Composition and Listening, "because there [sic] is a lot of concentrate in the class". He also answered that Speaking and Grammar were his best skills because "I'm good at speaking and in Grammar class because it's easy for me." Speaking was his favorite class "because we can share our different thoughts" and composition was his least favorite class "because there is a lot of writing." I found all of these answers very interesting as some of them seemed to conflict with the levels he'd been placed in: 4-Reading, 3-Composition, 3-Speaking, 5-Listening, 3-Grammar. The only time Hamad uses English outside the classroom is when he is forced to translate for his Foundations level friends from Kuwait. He gave a hilarious example of how he recently had to translate the process of his friends buying an American car and how they could not understand that they also had to buy auto insurance because of the laws here.
Hamad's reason for learning English, according to his filled out Needs Analysis, is "to get a great IELTS test [sic] for university. He needs a score of 5-5-6 for his chosen major, chemical engineering. He is thinking about taking the IELTS in December, but has not signed up for it yet. He listed the following as his reasons for signing up for a tutor: (1) to improve my English, (2) to have more vocabulary, (3) to know what I must focus on.
After discussing all the above --and because the 2 girls were A.W.A.L.-- we started to play Taboo. First I spent about 5 minutes explaining why I like using Taboo as a teaching game so much. In my opinion based on what I've seen, Taboo helps to develop all the skill areas and more in a second language: Listening, Speaking, Vocabulary, Problem Solving, Timed-Speaking, learning to speak "on your feet", and at the more advanced levels with lots of play practice, I really believe that second language players begin to "think in English".
Hamad picked up the rules very quickly, though at his lower level, we made the game a bit easier by having him first select 12 cards that were about vocabulary words he already knew. (Some of the Taboo cards are too specific to Amerian History or Culture to be good, general vocab cards. Besides, I wanted him to focus on recalling what English he does know, but driving him crazy with descriptions of a word he wouldn't have a reason for knowing, such as "parliament".) We split these 12 preselected cards among us as our initial playing deck. Hamad was much better at giving clues for words, than guessing the target word from guesses. We had a great deal of fun and we both laughed quite a bit. When the game (and our hour) was over, he took a picture of the game so he could buy one off of Amazon to try and play it with his Foundations friends at home.
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