Title: Unit 9: Helping a Tutee Tell a Story
Course: STEP DEV > Section: Tutoring Speaking

Objectives

- Identify the role that the tutor plays when helping a tutee practice accuracy and fluency while telling a story.

- Recognize the need for repetition with tutees who have serious difficulties.

Introduction

Storytelling is a good production task to help your tutee consolidate a target verb tense and practice fluency.  This type of activity is especially useful for tutees who have difficulty saying complete sentences. Telling a simple story will also help them prepare for oral presentations.

Tutees with very limited skills in English need a lot of preparation before they are able to tell a story well.  To prepare the tutee you can do the following:

     STEP 1:  Review  the target verb tense that will be used in the story quickly.

     STEP 2:  Review vocabulary that the tutee will need to tell the story.

     STEP 3:  Ask the tutee questions about their story and instruct them to answer in complete sentences.

    Then, once you have gone through these steps. the tutee can start telling their story.

Look at the More Irregular Verbs lesson and notice how  STEPs 1, 2 and 3 prepare the tutee for telling a story about a past vacation in STEP 4.  You can see in this lesson that by the time the tutee gets to STEP 4, they will be familiar with the vacation vocabulary and correct irregular verb forms that they will need to tell their past vacation story.  This preparation will make it easier for them to practice telling the story fluently.  In the next section, you will learn what to do while they are telling the story.

PRE-ACTIVITY

What could you do while your tutee is telling you their story in order to help them with accuracy later on?

Do you think you would act differently depending on whether your tutee were struggling to tell their story or telling it with relative ease?

ACTIVITY

To prepare a tutee to tell a story in the past about their last vacation, a tutor can ask specific questions about the trip. The tutor should also review the past form and vacation related vocabulary.

Read the exercise that was completed before a tutee tells his story about his last vacation in the following video.  As you can see, all the questions are in the simple past tense, which will enable the tutee to practice using these verbs before telling his story.

Watch the video, Helping a Tutee with Limited Skills in English Tell a Story.  As the tutee speaks slowly, the tutor is able to write down what he says.  Notice how the tutor corrects some of the tutee's minor errors, given that the focus is on helping the tutee accuracy and difficult vocabulary.

Story Telling Instructions

When you are helping a tutee prepare a story, make sure to have the following resource close by.

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POST-ACTIVITY

Click on the button to take the POST-ACTIVITY QUIZ.