11th-12th December.
We are working with ‘One Training’ in Dueren, with a student called Michael. He is a Polish born guy, with a need to improve his English for his job as a Technical writer. I will be working with Michael on a one to one basis for 5 days.
On the first day (Thursday), I began by doing a needs analysis questionnaire to ascertain his English ability and also his needs and wants from the course. This is crucial especially in this situation as we only have 5 days together. I would put Michael at an A2 level, and we established his biggest needs are in sentence structures, technical words, business correspondences and oral skills.
He explained he realised he wanted to do this course after he attended an interview and the interviewer asked him to describe himself in English, at this point he struggled to construct a sentence confidently.
We then did a personal profile each; I began by giving an oral presentation to Michael about myself, telling him my name, my age, where I am from, where I live now, my job title, the company I work for and my hobbies. I then asked M. to do the same about himself, which he did quite well but it helped me see where his was strong or weak.
We then spent the rest of the day refreshing prepositions, countable and uncountable (use of many/much, some/any, a few/a little, a lot of), important verbs, and the use of in, on and at.
Friday 12th December
I began today by concentrating on oral skills, so I began by telling Michael what I did on the previous night, which I broke down into sections, where (I went), when (what times), what (I did), who (with), why (reason), how (much, many). Using these headings I got Michael to firstly write about his previous night then to present it to me. Which he again did quite well, just to clarify his understanding and to use a different tense I asked him to use these headings to tell me about his plans for the coming weekend.
I then did an exercise which I think was very useful for Michael based on his work as a technical writer. He explained to me at the beginning of the course his main role was to create instruction manuals in different tasks. So I brought in a couple cooking recipes, which gave step by step instructions not too dissimilar to the manuals that Michael writes. I then asked Michael what his favourite meal was, which then together we created the recipe being descriptive as possible. We then ended the day by looking at phrases and words relevant to his work.