Aileen TS#5

  Friday evening I finally managed to meet up with my child tutee. I had no idea what to expect and honestly at first it was really hard to get started given the severe language barrier between me and the parents. I eventually found my way around to my tutee and tried to start off with the basics: an introduction to see how he would respond. I then noticed that he kept relying on his elder brother (he's in 5th grade my tutee in 4th) to answer and translate for him. So for this first session I really had to ask questions repeatedly directly to my tutee for him to respond in English instead of Swahili. I asked him to read the alphabet and numbers for me and although he could read both I found that he demonstrated extreme difficulty for reading words. I took out notebook paper so he could follow along with me to read basic sentences that I would repeat out loud. For example, "Hello my name is ___ and I like to ____ " My biggest difficulty at this stage was trying to get him to say how old he was for I couldn't find the set phrase equivalent in Swahili for him to familiarize himself structurally. We ended this part of the session by me providing drawings as visual aids for the sentences I was having him say.