Zuzana Kušnírová:
Teaching Individuals: my experiences
Motivation and teaching strategies,
Teaching courses and individuals
I have taught the Slovak language to students in a small private language school for 2 years.
We provide different courses at different levels. We usually offer class courses, but there are
always some individuals looking for one-to-one tutoring. Motivation for their language
learning is typically for professional opportunity, for spouse or studies at university.
Studying individually
Advantages:
one-to-one lessons , personalized learning, full concentration on a person, immediate
feedback, constant interaction, individual pace, voluntary language learners, peparing
a lesson plan depends on: level, length of study, needs
Disadvantages:
no interaction with other students, constant attention, more demanding preparation for
a teacher, less fun
We apply communicative teaching and try to develop all the skills:
 receptive (listening
 the
and reading) and productive (speaking and writing).
audio – lingual method (listening to model dialogues, repetition and drilling)
 topical,
select activities, following the coursebook
 objectives
 conversational
fluency or gramatical accuracy
 positive atmosphere
Three examples of students I work with:
A 14-year-old Korean student
She studies ballet at Slovak Secondary school what motivates her to learn the most of Slovak.
She is in a Slovak environmnet on a daily basis, so she listens to Slovak and needs to understand
and communicate. She needs logical grammar structures. She is a visual and a musical type of
learner. I use a lot of pictures and dialogues. She is very dilligent and hardworking. She prepares
very hard for each lesson.
A 28-year-old Bulgarian student
The student´s mother tongue belongs to slavic languages, the same as Slovak. That enables her
to master it perfectly. She has a great inner motivation because of her Slovak spouse. She is a
lingvistic and a logical type of learner. She is also very skillful and demanding to herself.
A 45-year-old Romanian student
She does not need Slovak inevitably because she uses English at work. It is her own interest to
know the language of a country living in at the moment. She works a lot but even if she does
not have enough time to study, she does her best. She is a visual, lingvistic and very systematical
type of student. She memorizes the sentences and learns them by writing.