Subject: Maths
Level: Secondary 1
Tutoring Tip: Weak in language

I had a secondary 1 student who received maths tuition from me. The strange thing was that he could easily churn out rather complex multiplications and divisions mentally, and in fact much faster than I could! It isnt that i'm so lousy or anything, although being in the army for quite some time does dull the brain a bit. He had no problem with short questions at all.

His problem laid in his poor grasp of the English language. He normally gets stuck at long, structured questions, most of which involve extremely long sentences and chim, bombastic words. I got quite a shock when I saw how the questions were structured as well - "Fill in the numbers preceding this certain number subsequent to this pattern, including its bearing and excluding the relevant expenditure bla bla bla"

The above might be an exaggeration, but the fact is that my poor student doesnt even understand "preceding" to begin with, how was he going to be able to understand what the question wants of his poor life?

I came up with a table for him with Weird Words in one column and Simple Words in another. So it appeared like this:
Weird Words - Simple Words
Precede - Before
Subsequent - After
Bearing - Degree
Relevant - Related
Expenditure - Spending

This helped him tremendously and he didn't need so much guidance in the structured questions thereafter. Rocks