Felipe and I - Reflections From a Volunteer Tutor

By Ross Kimberlin

For six months, June through December, I talked with Felipe almost every week. Felipe was my first EFL student, and each of us was part of a new chapter in the other’s life. We opened doors for each other, helped each other get closer to where we wanted to be, and had fun chatting along the way — and it would not have happened without the Nashville Adult Literacy Council.

Felipe is a minister, musician and Spanish teacher from Bogotá who had married a woman from Franklin he met through mission work. He had a Hispanic ministry at a bilingual church, but he also wanted to start giving sermons in English. I was a jack of all trades taking a CELTA class with the hope of one day teaching English as a foreign language overseas, and I liked the idea of getting my feet wet with some real tutoring alongside my class work.

In the second half of 2024, we made it happen. Felipe was my guinea pig, and I was his guide ( except when we switched roles, about which more below ). Without much prodding, he got it done: his first sermons in English, by Christmas. Felipe is highly motivated, and it helps that his wife speaks English natively. For my part, I finished my CELTA course and added some practical perspective to my class work while helping a student achieve his goals. Felipe and I shared something rewarding that we can both feel proud of.

We started out following the Burlington online curriculum, but over time, we started free-styling it more and more, until our lessons were mostly informal chats. The catch, though, is that academia sorely undervalues the challenge and the value of informal chats. Casual conversations are actually a great way to learn! They force us to think on our feet, overcome our perfectionism and hesitation, and adjust in real time. It is quite common for people to understand a language but not feel comfortable trying to speak it. The barrier is the fear of making mistakes and looking dumb. The solution is immersion: start talking a lot!

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I will share a few brief highlights from my experience with Felipe that felt valuable to me, in the hope that others might benefit from them. This was my first time teaching English to a Spanish-speaker, and it opened my eyes to Hispanic challenges with English. I took Spanish classes in school growing up, which made it easier to translate for Felipe when needed. However, translating doesn’t always suffice, and it can actually be counter-productive when students and teachers lean on it too much. When translating didn’t work, I was grateful afterward, because I had to stretch to find alternative teaching techniques, and Felipe and I both became better for it.

Later on in the winter, I also tutored a Brazilian student named Raiane who was visiting the US with her husband, and my prior experience with Felipe made a huge difference in how helpful I was able to be. Spanish and Portuguese are languages that you will want to have on your radar. Though not identical, they are closely related, and their native speakers often share similar enough struggles with English’s quirks that it is worth thinking about them side by side. They are the second and third most common languages in the Americas behind English, and they are spoken by hundreds of millions of people, including over 100,000 people in Nashville. It will definitely be useful for American EFL teachers to be familiar with these languages and what can make English alien to their native speakers.

Good teaching has to proceed from empathy and theory of mind. To help foreign learners as much as a teacher ought to, you should know something of their native language. No one is expecting you to speak it flawlessly as soon as you roll out of bed in the morning, but you do need to know how it works and what tendencies it creates. What sounds, word orders and other traits does it have and not have? Which aspects of English do its native speakers struggle with most? Why? What is different about it?

If you could use some help with all that, fear not: Michael Swan and Bernard Smith have already done a lot of the work for you. Their book Learner English provides summaries of challenges with English common to speakers of over twenty-two of the world’s most widely spoken languages. I have found it to be exceptionally helpful, and I heartily recommend it to every EFL teacher.

What are some common challenges for native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese, and how did I approach them with Felipe ( and later, Raiane )?

Vowels: One of the first big hurdles for Spanish- and Portuguese-speakers will be English’s baffling assortment of ( non-phonetically spelled! ) vowels. Spanish has only five vowel sounds, while English has over twelve, many of which have in-between sounds requiring mouth placement that much of the world has never used. For example, words like gather and rapper contain two sounds that Spanish never uses, the short A vowel, and “-er” pronounced like “rrr” instead of “air.” Ditto the “uh” sound in mother, brother, etc, and the short I in grip or drip. As a result, I heard battle pronounced like “bottle,” “pattern” pronounced like “pottern,” and this pronounced like “these.”

One approach that helped when pronouncing a tricky vowel in a new word was finding another word the student already knew that had a similar sound. For example, if the student hasn’t seen the word “hatchet” before but does know the word “cat,” then use “cat” as the reference to orient the student. When you start to like what you hear as students get closer to the desired sound, tell them to repeat that one a few times, so that the right sounds get reinforced.

Felipe has a mild Hispanic accent, and although we did not eliminate it, we did reduce it enough for certain key words to sound more natural. Eliminating someone’s accent entirely is usually impossible, and maybe not desirable, but even a few commonly used words spoken more intelligibly can make the difference between a conversation stalling out and making a connection with a new person.

Consonant clusters and ghost syllables: English consonant clusters are a mine field for speakers of Spanish and Portuguese, who will tend to stumble over them and try to soften them. The solution is lots of practice, once you have brought the trouble sounds to their attention. For example, let’s compare the words espacio and space, or estricto and strict. Each pair of words means the same thing, but the Spanish versions have soft, open vowels on each end of the word, to cushion the consonants, rather than starting and stopping out of nowhere. Horrors like “strep throat” and “strictly speaking” simply don’t exist in Spanish and Portuguese, and so you will often hear their speakers add ghost breaths at the beginnings of such words, turning them into “eh-strep” or “eh-stricc” ( with a ghost syllable at the beginning and a softened T at the end ).

A good exercise is to have them practice different words with the same consonant clusters. “Throwing darts” and “empty threat” both contain thr-, but they will challenge students differently because of the other elements in each phrase.

Many learners are also very likely to pronounce “-ed” as a new syllable every time, e.g. pronouncing liked “lik-ed,” as two syllables. In user-friendly Spanish and Portuguese, the letter “e” does always start a new syllable, and so English’s silent Es are always lying in wait, ready to pounce. This is something learners will need your help with. DK Publishing’s Grammar book from the English for Everyone series was a life-saver when it came to issues like these.

Rhythm and syllable stress: English is a stress-timed language, while Spanish and Portuguese are syllable-timed, meaning that stressed syllables in English are held for much longer than unstressed syllables. Foreign learners often don’t make a dramatic enough distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables, and so their speech might not have the rhythms that native speakers are used to. I found some success with a couple of different visual explanations that I list below.

So what can we do to help foreign learners?

Have them over-enunciate consonants that they soften, e.g. D, T, and R. Have them practice consonant clusters such as str- and thr-. Do web searches such as “biggest EFL challenges for Spanish-speakers” or “most difficult English sounds for Spanish-speakers” to get additional perspective on these challenges.

Have them practice variations, e.g. similar consonant clusters but in different words with different vowels — some will be easier or harder than others.

Do web searches for “list of phrasal verbs in English,” etc., and see what results you find. You should get several. Read through the articles and pick the best ones, then walk through them together as a vocabulary exercise, having the student read aloud to see which words and phrases are familiar and which are not.

Also send links to students in their language to share more abstract or advanced concepts. For example, if my students are not familiar with the idea of cognates or historical linguistics, I might go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate but then select the Spanish translation of the page, so that I end up sending the student https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognado.

Have them lengthen the syllables they shorten to emphasize syllable stress. Some students will speak louder instead of holding syllables longer; be ready to coax them toward greater length instead of greater volume.

Get visual! Show students graphics that help with rhythm and syllable stress, e.g.

CAPital LETters and UNderlines on STRESSED SYLlables

and

Write a new line

for every place

where you would start a new phrase

so that they can see

the language’s natural rhythm

in a different way,

then have your students

read aloud.

In general:

Wait to correct until they finish speaking. I always hated it when teachers interrupted me to pounce on every single tiny mistake before I could even finish my thought. Do take note of errors, but don’t kill your students’ flow too soon. Instead, hear them out and then have a post-game review once they finish. The newer your student, the more important this becomes. Early on, focus more on building rapport. You can add more corrections later, after you’ve established trust and students are more receptive.

Choose one improvement at a time. Be aware also that they will forget much of what you say and can only work on one thing at a time. Therefore, decide on one take-away you want them to remember, and remind them what that is. You can shift the focus of improvement periodically as they get a better grip on each task, but be explicit and let them know what that focus is.

Follow up with notes so you can both refer back to what you’ve worked on, and give them a plan for the next lesson.

Tell students about Toastmasters and Tenx9, and visit them yourself, for their benefit and your own. Watching other speakers and practicing speaking in front of groups will keep you sharp and expose you to motivated people with interesting ideas. It should also help you cultivate poise and patience and hone your awareness of body language, vocal variety, time limits, speech structure and meeting organization.

Let me also repeat that the following resources have been helpful to me: Learner English, by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith; DK Publishing’s Grammar book from the English for Everybody series; etymonline; and Sorry, No English by Craig Sorti.

Ease them into going native.

One of my specialties, which I have leaned into with positive results, is helping foreign learners with informal conversation and local folk idioms. Many English-speakers often equate linguistic difficulty with long, fussy Latinate words, but there are different kinds of difficulty. Having traveled a bit, I know that it is not reading literary language that is the biggest challenge for foreigners; instead, it is interpreting common speech, decoding unwritten idioms and slang delivered in local accents and dialect, especially under social pressure. Once I had felt how incompletely textbooks prepared me for being the only foreigner needing to show ID in a checkout line or trying to make small talk in a bar, I resolved to give students extra help with what they would hear regular people say while walking around every day.

This starts with my own speech. When getting to know my students, I ease them into things by toning down my Anglo quirks, and then I slowly increase the dose over time as they get comfortable and build immunity. First of all, I slow down, and I try to minimize my bubba accent and over-enunciate consonants instead of swallowing them, so that everything doesn’t melt into syrup. I go out of my way to avoid contractions, saying “do not” instead of doesn’t and “is not” instead of isn’t ( Craig Sorti has some good passages on this in Sorry, No English ). I choose single-word verbs such as escape and donate over phrasal verbs such as “break out” and “give away.” I also use Romance cognates when possible, such as spirit vs ghost or liberty instead of freedom.

The more comfortable students and I get with one another, the more quirks I add, slipping in a contraction here, a Germanic word there, and a phrasal verb in that one spot. I also make lists of folksy equivalents when appropriate. For example, there is the newsy term “disposable income,” but in real life, regular people often tend to say “money to burn” instead. Since students will encounter these things, they need to know them — but only after we’ve built up some fundamentals and confidence first. I want to build a bridge from their language to mine and walk them across, rather than just shouting for them to jump in and swim from the other side of a wide, murky river.

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Later on, Felipe and I would sometimes trade places, which kept things fresh. Since he was already a Spanish teacher, he was used to it and enjoyed taking the lead. Chatting in Spanish definitely helped me empathize with his weekly efforts as a student — after an hour, my brain was cooked. Felipe gave me a Spanish lesson right before I went to visit an Ecuadorian friend for Halloween weekend, and his guidance helped me avoid making embarrassing gaffes. This is something I now make extra-sure of with students, to warn them when a word or phrase has a potentially awkward local connotation. The weekend went off without a hitch and ended up being one of the highlights of my year. It also gave me another adult dose of compassion for foreign learners, as my hosts graciously tolerated an invisible checklist of gringo missteps while teaching me their own local idioms. Comparing cultural notes with a network of international friends has been one of the most satisfying developments of my life. We surprise one another, pardon minor sins, and have a good laugh about it all. Everyone should be so lucky.

Eventually, I got to see the milestone: Felipe’s first English-language sermon, on YouTube! It was fun to watch his relaxed delivery, comfortable stage presence and understated humor, cultivated over years of ministry and performing. I think that all teachers should take the opportunity to see what their students are like when the students are the ones onstage and in control, showing off years of experience that they’ve earned in some other domain. They might surprise you! Learners’ limited English can disguise what capable and accomplished people they are. However, even small amounts of careful polishing in the right places can uncover what is already special about them, so when they finally let it shine, try to be there to watch.

To conclude, I am thankful for Nashville Adult Literacy Council, and I know that Felipe is grateful, too. Not long into the new year, he upgraded to a better job. Meanwhile, I have tutored two more students and am searching for additional teaching roles. Because NALC connected us, Felipe got six months of lessons, and I got six months of tutoring experience, without either of us getting waylaid by red tape and financial burdens. NALC helped us both move forward into bigger, deeper lives. I hope that it will keep giving other people the same opportunities.