Sophie CO #2

    Today I sat in on Dr. Rios's reading class. The class began with an intensive acitivity. Students were shown sentences with new words, such as "roar." They then had to use context clues to figure out which of the multiple choices options was closest to what the word meant. When one student answered, Dr. Rios asked the other students if they agreed. He then had them write down what type of context clues they used (such as synonyms, antonyms, prefixes, etc). I am not familiar with asking students to explicitly name grammar conventions, but I could see how this made the acitivity clearer for students. When trying to decipher the word "inaudible," he encouraged students to remember and consider prefixes. 

    The class then read through a short story that had blanks in place of some words. Sentences would read something like: "My room was messy and (not organized) _________." This indirect activity was designed to teach students how to use prefixes. Dr. Rios was very open with the class about the nature of learning prefixes; he said that it's called a 'tricky topic' because you simply have to memorize it. I learned in this class that there's not an exact pattern to which prefixes accompany which words. 

    Finally, the class did a pre-reading activity for an article about the U.S. government. Before reading, Dr. Rios asked the class what they already know about the government. After reading, he asked a very open-ended question: Why have gun laws not changed? Students were able to identify that laws do not change when the executive, legistlative, and judicial branch are in disagreement. 

    For all three of the readings, Dr. Rios had students take turn reading aloud. He nearly always corrected their pronounciation. This is a new idea to me. In my tutoring sesions, I have not been correcting my student's grammar; I was worried this would be discouraging and ultimately not serve her long-term memory. However, Dr. Rios's approach seems to emphasize students' familiarity with the specific sounds of the English language. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sophie TS #20

 Kiki and I had our final session! It was sad to finish working with her, but it was lovely to see all the progress she made. I really enjoyed seeing her growth, and we recapped her TOEFL test and anything she found particularly hard about it. We worked a bit more on reading and grammar, but we spent most of the time working on speaking skills in casual conversation. She has improved a lot with reading and grammar, and I mainly only corrected errors she made multiple times. I also gave her a list of repeated errors to work on. 
Read more

Will TS#19

  I met with Marina again on Monday and we covered some subjects from her most recent classes. They were recently working on subjunctive mood. Surprisingly, there was an entire page devoted to “the subjunctive mood for dummies” on the for dummies website, so we looked through that briefly. She wasn’t having much trouble understanding, but we went ahead and looked through all the examples anyway. I don't remember why, but at some point, I used the expression “any port in a storm” and then spent a little bit of time explaining the meaning to her. We tried to think of some new scenarios that it would apply to and have her use it in a few different sentences. Since beginning this course, I have been really surprised to notice how frequently idioms are used in the English language. I feel like I have to pause to explain at least one, if not more, expressions that I use each session. It makes me understand how many countries highly value having a native English speaker in the classroom, ...
Read more

Vinnie TS #20

     This was my last tutoring session so Mariana and I went a got a tea at calvin's coffee. It was good to focus on conversation because we had never really done that. We talk about what our future plans were for the rest of the year, and some of our dreams in the future.  She talked about how she wanted to travel and was working on getting her real estate license and I told her my plans with the tefl certificate. I really liked getting to know my tutees better so it was a good way to end it. 
Read more