Sophie TS #4

 Today, I lowered Kiki's affective filter by talking to her about norms in China. We talked about the ideological reasons for media control in both China and the United States. I also learned more about the grading and schooling system in China, and Kiki talked about what she enjoys and dislikes in Chinese and American teaching systems. This helped me to understand more of her educational background and the kinds of teaching she is comfortable with. I also taught her more about the culture in American high schools. We then practiced listening skills as she feels she has the biggest need for growth in this area. We used TOEFL online practice to listen to audio clips and answer questions. I feel that Kiki would benefit from taking notes while listening to the audio, so we practiced the best ways for her to go about that. She also expressed that she has trouble identifying proper nouns, especially people and places, when listening to audio clips. We went through some segments of audio clips and I had her listen for how proper nouns are introduced. We will continue to work on listening and note-taking. 

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