Thursday, May 18, 2017

Sarah TS #2


Date/Time: 15 May / 3:00 - 4:00PM 
Location: Student Lounge @ CIES 
Topic/Skill:  Timed speaking 
Feedback provided to tutee: My tutee initially told me that she wanted to focus on reading comprehension so I had brought her a practice passage with multiple choice questions. We had worked on half together during our first session, and she finished the rest during today's session with minimal issues. We went over the pronunciation of a few words, but other than that, she answered all the comprehension questions correctly and told me she found the text "somewhat" (i + 1!) challenging and would like similar activities to work on -I had prepared another activity for her to follow up on during our next meeting -but for the majority of this session, I asked my tutee if she would like some speaking practice because she seemed to speak, albeit completely understandable, quite slowly and carefully. According to the directions of this particular activity I pulled from a TOEFL practice website, she would have 15 seconds to read and plan an answer to a short response question, and 45 seconds to speak (which apparently would be spoken into a recording device if it was a part of a real TOEFL exam). I used my phone as a timer to role-play this activity and tell her when time was up. 
Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned:  We both ended up liking the timed-speaking activity and practiced the same question several times. Although she wasn't having comprehension/organizational issues in her answer, I felt she could practice speaking more clearly and confidently. I noticed some minor grammatical errors in her responses, so I asked her if she wouldn't mind writing a response down for next week to see if the errors were mainly just due to the time constraint. All in all, I learned that a student might not be exactly aware of what they need to practice, and as a tutor, you might want to try and help your tutee figure this out.

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