Help needed!

[Tmelton]

Hi there

I am currently working on my CELTA assignment (focus on the learner) and was looking for some advice/ help/ suggestions.

I interviewed a german student who has come to England to improve her english in order to be able to get a job back home. She is a very quick learner, very keen to participate and use newly learned vocab, though not particularly keen on listening exercises.

In her written work she has a tendency to use a lot of uneeded language- almost over extending her point. She has difficulty with using the correct tenses. she occasionally misses determiners and personal pronouns but not very often. There is also a lot of formal lexis- furthermore, usage, moreover.

A couple of sentences that stand out are-
'Ive been satisfied about my host family/ I've been satisfied about the staff.....'
'...everything is good organized. Moreover I like the bus/train/tube system in England....
'During my aupair I go to school....'

In her spoken interview, again she has some difficulties with tenses, and she spent a lot of time checking/ self correcting herself, heard via the inflection in her voice. she had a few moments where she would use the words in the wrong order.

Other errors I noticed were-
preper- prepare
cafe- coffee
'have' pronounced 'haf' (sorry cannot get phonetics to work on this!)
'because' pronounced 'bicoss'-in fact nearly all of her 's' pronunciateion, where a native would use the 'z' was used as the unstressed sound.
v/w- 'visit' pronounced 'wisit' and occasionally othe 'v' sounds the same way. she also sometimes pronounced her 'w' as a 'v'
'he is very good in english, yeah, and he musn't, only me'- speaking about her boyfriends ability to speak english and the fact that it was only her that needed to come practise.

If anyone has any good suggestions or practical advice of any other errors I should be looking for, or any ideas for activities to help her improve, it would be most appreciated! I don't want anyone to do the work for me- just a push in the right direction!

Thank you very much!

[Soup]

Originally Posted by Tmelton

Hi there

I am currently working on my CELTA assignment (focus on the learner) and was looking for some advice/ help/ suggestions.

Sorry. It's an assignment. You're on your own.

[Earthlark]

Just a little practical advice: Make sure she's doing plenty of reading, and make sure it's stuff she'll enjoy. You can help her find the right material. This is one of the best ways to pick up fluency, especially at her level. It sounds like she's gotten by most of the big stuff and is working on some smaller (and less important) aspects of grammar and fluency. Also encourage her to spend plenty of time with native speakers if she's not already so she can pick up on the way things are spoken. Good luck.