Textbook & Placement Test for Tutoring 1-1 Smart Teen

[lx93]

I'm tutoring a very bright 15-year old Korean student who just arrived in the U.S. a few short weeks ago. While they are catching on VERY quickly, their proficiency currently appears to be at an Intermediate level.

Q. 1) What are some good placement tests?

Q. 2) What are some good textbooks that others have had a good experience with in this kind of situation?

I can certainly tell that this is going to be quite different from my previous experience teaching ESL, when I taught semi-literate migrant farm workers in groups of 3-6.

[Tdol]

What are their plans? Have they come to the US to study or are they going to go back to Korea?

[lx93]

My impression is that they're here for at least an undergraduate degree.

Her aunt, who speaks English with an accent & some grammar mistakes but can always communicate her thoughts, wants them to EVENTUALLY start preparing for the TOEFL, but has realistic expectations. After all, the student did have trouble with matching sentence fragments by joining compound nouns, and found a pronunciation exercise of "-ed' (D/T/ID) to be either too boring or too challenging, hard to say which is the case.

Bottom line is, I can definitely see the need for some objective form of assessing their current level of proficiency. When we first met, they greeted me w/ some advanced expression which made me wonder if they hadn't been here for years- but then it became obvious that they were not, and I now want to know more specifically what sort of areas we need to focus in on.