A study case

This is about two students i helped for 3 months to improve their grades at school, they were brothers a boy and a girl they were studding at the same school but at different levels, she was at 2^dn year and he was at 4^th year, they had different personalities of course, first the girl was the kind of “I don’t have time to this” she was well mannered but she always wanted a result as soon as possible so she gets stressed all the time, the boy on the other hand was “the cool guy” just to call it somehow, I don’t mean that he doesn’t care about his grades or studies but he was the kind of student we will always have “I’m not going to use this before I graduate from school” that was his mantra,  what they share or what they have in common besides they are brothers  is the fact that their affective filter is too high, as I said, she was stressed because she wanted to produce the language at the very moment she gets some new content, and he did not care about the uses of the language outside the classroom, because of their schedule I took different sessions with tem along the week so I’m going to divide this in two cases.

                First the girl, I had to find a way to make her to take it easy when putting into practice new knowledge, it was great that she tried to produce anything when requested, the problem was that every time she made a mistake because she pushing it, she got mad about it, I had to let her know that learning is a process and she had to take it step by step, that they way to learn and apply is trough trial and error, the key is to practice as much as possible, that was a kind of motivational talking we had during a session, I gave her a bunch of verbs and vocabulary to learn just to start, then when she came with homework from school I used all that vocabulary to explain the topics she was studding,  she learned really quick to write sentences,  then paragraphs and some pronunciation too, so I can say I teach her not only the language but to be patient.

                Then I had the boy, he was not a challenge at all actually, the thing was his lack of interest on learning English, he was a young man so he liked sports, cars, music, girls and also he wanted to go to a military school, so I took those aspects to make relationship between his interests and the language, so I did, I basically used the communicative approach in every single activity he brought and it worked all the time specially with music and sports related topics or when I was able to use them as examples so he came to realize that ok, English is not only a subject to pass and that’s it which is what I always say, and I told him please if you are going to become a soldier don’t forget to be well mannered, don’t forget your culture, don’t be a man with a gun who receives orders, after a time his mom told me that he graduated with a good record and he applied  to the navy academy at Pto Fijo.