Grammar concept? Hmmm… Let me see…/ a tutor’s guide to the Universe

There is a lot about grammar you could say I haven’t “mastered” yet, but I pretty much know my stuff. Besides the concepts I’m not familiar with, I could say capitalization sometimes seems tricky. I know because I was so confused in a session I had earlier today. But then again it shouldn’t be too hard to explain. You have proper nouns, months, days, titles, and etc… it’s kind of hard to explain because I don’t have it memorized in my head yet.

This is a tough one to answer because I really can t think of any. I have a concept… to me I think it would be hard explaining synonyms to an ESL/LEAP student. I know it would be easier to explain verb tenses to an English 2010 student than to an ESL/LEAP student. When learning a new language I always get stuck with verb tenses. So I could imagine them getting confused as well.

Another concept I thought about were gerunds and gerund phrases. What is a gerund? Let me look it up for second… ok here we go. “A gerund is a noun formed from a verb by adding a suffix.” how would you explain that? How would you explain it so an ESL/LEAP student can understand? I think that would be pretty hard.

This next section is answering the next prompt. I would organize a session with two pieces of paper. One being the writer’s paper the other would be something I would call a tutoring session guide. This slip of paper would have any question you might ask a student about their paper. Including important questions like “what class?”, “What’s the paper supposed to be about?”, “what’s the assignment?”, “how many pages does it have to be?”, and any other question that might propel you further into the session. You can make this slip with a word processing program, print and cut out a slip for every session you do. I hope this helps with the question.

Well it’s getting quite late and I’ve only had two lousy hours of sleep the past two days. I’m going to call it a day and get home.