Excel at Deutsch! Half-Hour Tutoring Sessions

Before we meet online, learners taking this tutoring course and their parents will determine which skills and/or concepts we should concentrate on. Here are some, but by no means all, of the topics we could look at:
- German pronunciation;
- common, everyday expressions and phrases;
- improving your conversational German;
- improving your written German;
- honing your listening skills;
- reading comprehension;
- giving oral presentations auf Deutsch;
- mastering aspects of German grammar (e.g., prepositions, verb tenses, subordinate clauses, relative clauses).
I'll provide materials for us to work on during our time together based on the information you provide. 
Depending on input from the students and his/her parents, we'll emphasize one or more of the four modalities of language - speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
If we concentrate on building oral communication skills, we'll develop fluency in a wide range of everyday situations such as talking about oneself and asking questions about other people; providing opinions and judgments; effective speaking in restaurants and stores; and expository speech.
If honing listening skills are called for, the learner could, for example, listen to series of audio and video material and answer progressively more challenging questions about their content - initially true/false questions, then selecting answers from a word bank, and finally tackling open-ended questions that call for judgment and creative thinking.
Should reading skills be in the forefront, I'll introduce a set of progressively more challenging texts, and (as was the case with the listening unit) I'll check for comprehension on increasingly more complex levels - literal understanding followed later on by judgment and speculation.
If the student wants to improve in the area of writing, he or she will prepare texts based on visual cues (such as individual photographs or a series of pictures that tell a story), and we'll review those texts in detail during class.

Activities to support these learning objectives will include many of the following:
- learning and reinforcing new vocabulary using conversational formats;
- close readings and discussions of dialogues and texts;
- close readings and discussions of news articles and scripts for online German educational videos;
- using pair communicative formats to build oral fluency;
- telling and writing stories based on visual cues; and
- responding to questions about social and cultural issues orally and in writing.