FSU TEFL 120 Fall 1, 2024

 Kiki and I practiced writing today. She had ten minutes to read an example TOEFL prompt and write a response. We then went over her response and assessed it for proper grammar, sentence structure, and overall messaging efficiency. We did this activity twice, and each time she explained what she would do differently the next time. She had some trouble with conditional phrases and countable/uncountable nouns. I noticed significant grammatical improvement and sentence structure variation on her second try. I was excited to meet with her today because of Halloween, so we spent some time going over the holiday. I gave her tips on how to interact with the holiday and filled her in on the various practices surrounding Halloween. 

 Today  I met with Wei for the first time so it was really just a meet and greet. I got to learn about where she's from and when she moved her. She has already graduated from the CIES program and is now studying for the TOEFL exam. We set up some times to meet and exchange contact information. I also asked her about her goals, how she learns best, and what material she wants to focus on to help her get ready for the exam. She said that 80 percent of the Toefl exam is linked to listening so that is probably what we will practice a lot. 

     This tutoring session was with Mariana and we went over spelling and practice some pronunciation along with a little bit of vocab. First I had her practice by doing a spelling test. I would say the word so it also required her to focus on listening and context clues. Then she would write down the word. There were 10 words in total and after we went over them after. She got most of them right but the ones she missed we discussed and then practice. I then explain her a spelling rule that was helpful. After we did a word search together and then did some pronunciation practice with these words. 

 Today I met up with Nejoud on October 30th. She told me she was going to the FSU football game, so I spent the first half of the session explaining American football in detail.  From explaining defense and offense, to how football works moving 10 yards, and how the score works, Nejoud ended with a better understanding of football for her Saturday game. Even director Patrick Kennel stopped by to see my football lesson which he found entertaining and educational. The second half of the session we focused on speaking skills, I had different prompts talking about what sports are popular in Saudi Arabia? With other follow up questions, I was monitoring Nejoud's grammar and pronunciation. 

     I met with Marina again this afternoon. We spent the first part of the session reviewing noun and adjective clauses. Last time, she was having some difficulty with it but we went through the exercises I had prepared and she did really well. After that, we moved on to perfect gerunds and perfect infinitives. She had a fill-in the blank exercise from class and was having a pretty hard time understanding when to use one versus the other. I had a lot of trouble trying to explaining how to differentiate when to use each one. It was pretty easy for us to identify them on the worksheet, but she had some trouble trying to produce her own sentences with them and I was not doing a great job of providing her grammar rules to help with it. We watched a video about it and looked up some reference material but I think it wasn’t quite getting through to her. Now that her English is advancing, the subtle differences between the grammar rules are getting harder to explain. Hopefully ...

 I met up with Nejoud on October 28th and we focused on reading comprehension. We first started by going over tips when doing reading comprehension like reading the questions prior to the reading or how to paraphrase a question in an answer. After in one of the activities she was given from her class, we practiced and applied these skills. Following, she informed me last session that she has taken the IELTS and is planning on taking it again. She shared with me that she needs to improve on her reading and listening skills. So we did together a practice reading section of IELTS, where again we applied the new tips to aid reading comprehension. 

      I met with Marina this afternoon and we went over some work from a couple different classes. She was assigned to write a formal complaint style email, so we started with that. The email was really good, there were only a few minor corrections to make. I prompted her to supply correct answers to replace a few words and she was able to do it for most of them. The main issue with the email was the incorrect use of “have” in a few spots where it made more sense to say “done” or “did”. After that, we worked on another assignment that involved gerunds and perfect infinitives. She did pretty well with that one as well. The rest of the session we focused on noun clauses versus adjective clauses. The assignment was to write several example sentences for each one, in relation to a Halloween themed reading that they were given. She’s not really having any trouble identifying them, but she’s having a difficult time creating example sentences that use one or the other inten...