1st ESL Class

During my first ESL class, I worked with J. He's a 33-year-old male from Michoacan, Mexico. (He had to spell that one out for me.) Just to break the ice a bit,  we introduced ourselves primarily in Spanish to make him feel comfortable. I found out some of his interests, for example what he likes to eat at home, what kind of American beer and music he likes, what his job is, etc. Having a conversation entirely in Spanish with a native Spanish speaker is very different for me. I rather enjoyed it. After our introductions, we changed to a more scholarly note. I went through the English alphabet and had J pronounce every letter while also writing each letter out on paper. We then went through the Spanish alphabet to make sure that I had it right, and it turned out that J could not remember some of the letters. I then had him name an English word for each letter of the alphabet. If he could not think of a word, I would open my Span-Eng dictionary to the English side and have him look through there for any words he recognized. I could tell J was struggling a bit, so we went through the pronunciation of all the English vowels, and I broke down what a long vowel sound was as opposed to a short vowel sound by using them in different words.

Then for a lesson that was more reality-based, I went through the dinner menu from the restaurant I work at. I broke down the menu into  parts: Appetizers, salads and soups, entrees, desserts, and drinks. I would first say what I thought the menu item would be called in Spanish and then what it would be called in English, and then have J pronounce it. For example, I explained that there was fried calamari on the menu as an appetizer. J told me that anything fried was called, "dorados en aceite." I told him how the process of ordering food in a restaurant would go and the prices of menu items. He seemed to have fun with this because it was a reality-based situation and also because he could help me with some of the words in exchange. I am definitely looking forward to working with J again, and possibly working in the textbook next time.