When I was young, I told myself that there are 3 professions that I would never go into: teaching, law and law enforcement.But starting this week, I'll be teaching my mother English. Actually, this is not my 1st time tutoring someone. During my bro's 'O' Levels, I helped him with his History and he managed to score a B3 despite flunking the subject in all previous exams.
We went to the bookshop a few weeks ago to choose materials for the weekly lessons and we had to pick the simplest because my mother has no foundation in English at all. So what we bought were a book at K1 level and a packet of 40 flashcards designed for 2-6 year-olds.
Before this week, she has already picked some words from the book (man, woman, boy, girl etc.) and practised writing them on her own. I just gave her a spelling test and she scored 7 out of 10: not bad. Looking at her printing those neat, rounded words on the exercise book and muttering to herself the letters that make up each word, I realise what a difficult undertaking it is to learn a new language from nothing. Nothing to build upon, nothing to compare to, and nothing to fall back on.
Everything would have to be by memorisation. She worries about how easy it would be to forget the pronunciation of the words. She doesn't know hanyu pinyin and has no idea how each letter sounds. I worry about how I'm going to teach her grammar when I haven't even figured out the intricacies of tenses. And how do you explain why a word can mean many different things and a thing can go by many different names?
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