FSU TEFL 120 Fall 1, 2024

 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. 

       I had my last meeting with Marina today. I had originally prepared some examples to help her with the “must’ve” and “might’ve” contractions, but we never got around to them. We ended up talking for the entire session, and before we knew it, nearly an hour had gone by, so we finished up.  We discussed a ton of subjects. She filled me in on her Thanksgiving break, and then we talked about her plans for the future. We also spoke about my dad passing and my own plans. The conversation shifted to finances, and we talked about how difficult it can be to get ahead in the U.S., considering all the bills that one has to pay in order to stay afloat. We touched on rent costs, insurance prices, and more, before moving on to discuss credentials, certifications, and degrees.  It was really nice to just talk and brainstorm with each other about our ideas for the future. We also discussed the pros and cons of having pets, especially when it comes to moving and makin...

  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, ...

     I met with Marina on 11/25. I had hoped to make this post sooner, but had some family issues come up, so my memory is a little hazy as I write it now. Usually we do some small talk at the beginning, but I don’t quite remember what we talked about. I should’ve written it down. I do know from my notes, that we talked more about her TOEFL exam because she had received all her final grades for it. She was already expecting that the reading section would be her worst score and it officially was. She earned a score of 12 out of 30 points, which she was not happy about at all. I looked around online and found a video with a bunch of tips for the TOEFL reading exam. We watched through the whole thing together and anytime she was confused about something, I paused the video and asked her to take note of her question. At the end, we went over all her questions and I tried to clear up any confusion. The video had a lot of helpful info, it was from TST Prep on youtube. A lot of ...

Last week, Kiki and I discussed more sociocultural differences and overlaps between the U.S. and China in the beginning of our session. We then talked about where she's at with her English skills and helped her make a rough timeline for skil improvement. Kiki and I reviewed reading practice questions on the TOEFL site. We went through practice problems and discussed different ways to approach them. We went over how to read between the lines, and we discovered that her main troubles are in interpreting the qurstions themselves as opposed to understanding the reading. We looked for patterns in the types of questions asked.  (I forgot to log this one, hence the out of order)

 Today, Kiki and I talked about the history of Thanksgiving. She has very little existing schema on it, so I filled her in one the history of it and why it has evolved to be such a family-oriented holiday. She also taught me about Dragon Boat, a similiar holiday in China. We discussed tang ping, which is a Chinese movement that rejects and rebels against their aggressive work schedules and high expectations. We discussed the correlates of tang ping in America. I brought a book and she read a chapter out of it; it was connected to tang ping through its discussion of how shopping, drugs, and other addictions are substitutes for real human needs of connection and fulfillment. It discusses how these replacements help us both realize and ignore the general lack of fulfillment in modern society. This is an advanced reading text, but it also covers some more esoteric themes, making it a challenging read for Kiki. Overall, she seemed to enjoy the reading and engaged with it quite a bit....