u/EnglishWithEm

Hiya, I'm looking for advice and ideas. I have a shy 8 year old student, intermediate level. She is not super talkative, and when she does talk, I'm not able to get her to produce anything but one note/tone. She doesn't use word stress, sentence stress, or inflect questions, exclamations, etc.

I teach her for 35 minutes every weekday, so I'm able to try something different a little bit at a time at the start of each lesson. I've tried using a piano keyboard (low to high being left to right), singing, humming, repeating things, shadowing, etc. But every single sound she makes, every vowel and syllable, is the same note.

I know she likes music and plays the piano so I'm just not sure what is going on. I just wrote an email to her mom today seeing if she had any ideas as well.

Thoughts?

I'm a bilingual English/Czech speaker and the idea is to form a group of online ESL teachers from different backgrounds to share ideas, materials and motivation with each other. Each of us would adapt the content to our other language and share it on our own platforms that are marketed towards students with different L1s.

My plan is to build a social media presence that can lead learners to a subscription type platform (similar to Patreon). I want to have a baby in 2028, so I'm trying to move to something I could do during that time.

An example of types of content that subscribed learners would get:
- weekly topics with compilations of links to helpful materials (exercises, articles, videos...)
- regular writing prompts that they can submit to me for correction
- regular pronunciation challenges that they can submit recordings of to me for correction
- Q&A type stuff including my written answers, short videos and/or livestreams
- fun stuff like memes, jokes, quotes, etc.

Our group could be on whatever platform would work for people. Could be a Discord server, a Facebook group or based in Google. We could share materials, ideas and resources with each other. If one person doesn't have much time or isn't feeling creative, they can use the topic and adapt the materials of another member for that day/week.

By 'bilingual' I mean people who are native in two languages or highly proficient in both English and another language. I find most students, even advanced ones, interact a lot more when the platform is in their native language and the content compares and contrasts English with their native language. Being able to speak both gives us the opportunity to create a site they can navigate in their L1 and contact you using it if needed, while still getting information and feedback from someone who is a native/advanced English speaker.

I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone, and if you're interested in the group, feel free to DM me. :)