In preparation for teaching English abroad, I decided to volunteer as a tutor at a local community center to see if this was something I could do and at the same time provide English language tutoring to someone seeking it. I got off to a strong start with a twelve-hour training with Literacy Works.

I’d hoped to assist with a class, but that wasn’t possible at the time so I chose to work with a student one-to-one. I was paired with R, a woman in her forties who had immigrated a few years prior and was staying with her sister’s family while she worked in a bakery. She had what seemed an overbearing boss who asked her to work sometimes twelve hours a day; he hailed from a neighboring country and because the customers also tended to speak R’s native language, she didn’t have much chance to speak English during the day. She wanted to improve her English to find a better job.

We got along well, trying to meet twice a week in the evenings, and she spoke enough English that we could communicate fairly easily. We had a textbook which we both agreed was at about the right level, so this was good, though sometimes it was hard for me to decide what to work on. While her grammar definitely wasn’t perfect for the langauge she used, it was generally good enough, and she had no trouble understanding the content of the book, even if she couldn’t always produce the same language correctly. Looking back with the experience I have now, it might have been useful for me to have shown her a larger number of the resources offered by the community center and put more of a burden on her to select what she was interested in. As an experienced teacher, I’m also now much more comfortable letting students know that there is no magic text to read that will give them exactly what they need to know, and no magic dialog to memorize – they just have to practice English again and again and improvement will come over time. She also had to cancel our lessons fairly frequently – unfortunately this meant her progress was slower and I “gained” fewer hours of experience than I’d hoped – but this is just a reality for her and one of many immigrants who have to work a lot.

I think for R, who’d been waiting for a tutor, the lessons were, at the very least, a chance to practice speaking English, and I hope she felt she expanded what she knew and could use over the few months we had lessons.

As far as volunteering goes, this seemed a worthwhile way for me to spend time; as preparation for the work I ended up doing later, teaching English to groups, this was helpful if not particularly similar. It was a good introduction to communicating with an English-language learner and also to preparing lessons.

For more on my training and the organization through which I got it, see the Volunteer Logue post on Literacy Works.