Suggestions for Agenda with Tutoring

I have gotten up to lesson 1.6 or so of Rocket Spanish. I have invited a person from Honduras to sit with me for a few hours on Saturday Mornings to help me practice my spanish. She speaks passable english, so I was able to tell her what I was looking for, which is agumenting your course. In fact, her objective is to better her english at the same time. Can you give me some suggestions on 1. How do I control what we talk about? Giive her a written copy, in advance, of the lesssons I have covered so far? 2. How long should we spend once a week? One hour, two, three, four? 3. How do they do this in the Immersion courses, such as one takes from Berlitz. Concentrate on sentences, phrases, learning new nouns, or ??? 4. If I were to go to , for example Costa Rica, in an Immersion trip, how to they handle this? Living with a Host family on these trips, How does the guest interact with the host in the evenings? Do they play charades, discuss using the words/phrases learned during the day, or ???? 5. The lady is expecting to use the time improving her english at the same time. Should we set aside a period of time to speak only one language or the other, or just jump back and forth.? 6. Should be try to do any written augmentation to the 'lessons'. either during or between our 'classes'.? Other suggestions>? Thanks in advance..............

Hello Don, Here are some suggestions for you. 1. How do I control what we talk about? – At the end of every chapter there is a list of the vocabulary used in that chapter. You could show your friend that list and maybe get her to create a mock up conversation from that specific vocabulary list. At the same time you can do the same for an English conversation, in this way she has something to study from (vocabulary wise that is, you can give her a copy of the vocabulary for her to study). 2. How long should we spend once a week? – If you are going to do it only once a week and for 2 languages (you Spanish & friend English) I suggest you spend as long as you can on it, saying that you don’t want to overdo it to start with… don’t want it to get boring. 3. How do they do this in the Immersion courses? – Every school has their own methods so it really depends on what you want to achieve, if fluency is what you want then practise your vocabulary and learn how to string sentences together. Don’t spend too much time worrying about grammar as that you can learn by yourself, make good use of having a fluent Spanish speaker around… speak and then speak some more. Make sure your friend corrects you if you say something wrong and just try to remember it rather than spend 10 minutes asking why it is said that way. Repetition is a great tool. 4. Living with a Host family. – I could not answer this for sure as I have never experienced such a thing, but if I put myself on a host family’s shoes I would say you would interact within a normal family environment… that is talking at the dinner table watching TV with them, going shopping with them and so on… if you are lucky enough for your host family to have young children above the age of 5, you would greatly benefit from taking the time to talk to them as children are naturally curious and will take the time to get to know you and will take pride in anything they can teach you. 5. Time management – You should set times when you practise Spanish and then English, a good idea would be to speak Spanish for the first half hour then repeat the same conversation in English, then start a new conversation in Spanish and once again have the same conversation in English… 6. Should be try to do any written augmentation to the 'lessons'. Either during or between our ‘classes’? – It is always a good idea to write things down and plan the lessons but do this prior to starting, maybe take turns you plan it one week and she plans it the next. I sincerely hope that helps you. Thanks for the questions; I’m sure many people will find this useful. All the best and good luck! Mauricio.