FSU TEFL 120 Fall 1, 2024

     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. 

  I met with Marina on Thursday, and we had a pretty productive session. First we went over her quiz results from our previous meeting. She did pretty well. It was a strange quiz, mostly based off a Mr. Bean video. She got most of the answers correct, so there wasn’t much to talk about with that. We did some TOEFL reading prep from a link I found online. After that, I read a section of a book to her and asked her to summarize it to me verbally. It was a simple short story from a Ray Bradbury anthology. I took notes as she spoke and corrected her mistakes afterwards. Then, she read the next section of the book herself and summarized that portion in writing. We looked through the paragraph she wrote, and I corrected her mistakes again. After that, we just talked briefly about her plans for the future and both of our goals to move to Europe. We had a nice, productive conversation and ended things there.  

I was able to meet with Marina again on Wednesday this week. We started by checking in about some TOEFL prep stuff. She said reading was her worst score so I looked up some simple exercises and we went through them together. Afterwards we looked at a quiz she has to take about reduced adjective and reduced adverb clauses. The quiz presented incorrect sentences and she was supposed to rewrite them with the correct form of reduced adverbs or adjectives. Honestly, I thought it was a pretty poorly designed quiz. The correct answers didn’t seem like sentences that would be used in real life very often. The whole thing seemed very forced with minimal practical benefit that would come from it. Either way, we got through it ok and ended the session with that.  Next time we plan to do more work on TOEFL prep.

 For this tutoring session Mariana and I wanted to focus on conversation. So went to a coffee shop and practiced ordering and then talked about a lot of different things. We made comparisons about American culture and Colombian Culture. We talked about some of the things we want to do in the future and some other things. It was our last tutoring session so it was good to have a conversation practice, where we could talk about things that Mariana wanted to talk about. 

 I met with Wei again and we watched a couple videos and then went over them. She really wants to learn about culture so we watched a classic american sitcom. We watched some clips from the office and then went over the dialogue. First we watched the whole video all the way through. Then we watched it and really analyzed the dialogue. We would look into certain sentences and then go off on different tangents and talk about American culture. 

     Today I met with Mariana, and we worked on grammar She wanted to talk about how to use whose, who, and whom.  First we watched two different videos, one that talked about whom and who. She was struggling with this one so we watched the video twice and we talked about the problems she was having with it. After we came up with some examples, and went over them. We then watched a video about whose and how/when to use it. We then created a couple sentences also. 

 Today I met with Wei again, and the point of our tutoring sessions is really to just practice speaking and talking about American Culture. We usually will watch video together and just go from there. Today she wanted to talk about her favorite American Films. Hers was Shawshank Redemption because it gave her hope. We continued to talk about how movies can inspire people and give them strength. After we started talking about what it means to be free and what freedom means to both of us. I am really enjoying these conversations with her and I love to learn more about her. Throughout the session she asked me questions about particular idioms and informal language, and thats where I teach her about culture or speech patterns.