Raleigh TS #1

Date/Time: 5/10/17 (3pm)
Location: CIES
Topic/Skill: getting to know each other
Feedback provided to tutee: help on summary of news article

Today, I met with my adult tutee, Dasom. Because today was our first session, it took a while to get things going, but she told me that she wants to work on her speaking more than anything else. She said this is her third session at CIES, and she doesn't want to go to school here. She just wants to learn English to be more competitive back in Korea, and she said she wants to work for the government. She said she also wants to work on reading, so we went over a reading assignment together where she was supposed to read an article and then summarize it in a paragraph. At first, she was just pulling words straight from the article to summarize, so I told her to try and use her own words in order to understand the article better by thinking about it differently. We went through the article in sections, and I was just making sure that she understood everything as she was reading it. I had her highlight any ideas that seemed important to the main purpose of the article. As we worked through it, she seemed to have a better grasp of what message the article was trying to convey. We also went over some of the vocabulary in the article. She seemed a little bit shy about her speaking even though I understood her just fine. In our next session, I'm going to bring more reading material for her, and I'll have her read some of it aloud because she said that she's not confident in her pronunciation.