4th August 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Tetyana Malysheva moved to the United States with her husband, and quickly realised that talking with native English Speakers was much more difficult than she expected. Tetyana’s husband advised her to apply for a tutoring program at their local library to help with her spoken English. The tuition program was, and still is, relatively small, and it took nearly a year for Tetyana to be matched with an ESL (English as a Second Language) tutor, but she has been working with her English tutor, Rachel Merfeld for a year now, and is ready to begin a doctorate program at Oklahoma University.
Tetyana explained how effective private tuition can be: “Rachel helped me to explain my thoughts more naturally” she said. Also, Tetyana felt that trying to learn English by mixing with other English speakers was a problem because people could make sense of what she said, and didn’t attempt to correct her, or explain when something was phrased unusually. Tetyana added that having a tutor was an opportunity to be called out, and critiqued.
The tutoring program is based at Norman Public Library, and has been running for nearly 20 years, but still operates using relatively few tutors, with only 79 tutor/student pairs. However, the organisers are happy with the results they get each year. Tetyana is a complete success as far as they are concerned, but not an isolated situation, with many students benefiting from the private tuition they receive.