Jennifer TS#9

Date/Time: July 2, 3:45PM

Location: Black Dog Cafe

Topics: TOEFL Listening & Reading Practice

I met Sheila at Black Dog Café for tutoring. She wants to focus on passing the TOEFL exam so I thought us doing practice exercises for it would be good to develop her listening/speaking/reading skills. Here is the website that we were working with. https://www.englishclub.com/esl-exams/ets-toefl-practice-listening.htm She wants to focus on passing the TOEFL exam so I thought us doing practice exercises for it would be good to develop her listening/speaking/reading skills. I started Sheila off by explaining the practice exercise to her. We listened to the first clip and we worked together for her to answer the questions. There was more difficulty than I expected so I was wondering if it was just that particular listening clip or if this was not level appropriate. I helped her figure out some of the words that she was having a hard time with and defined/explained the words to her. We then moved on to the next listening exercise and questions. This particular exercise was an academic lecture, which was way above Sheila’s current level. She had a lot of problems understanding the lecture and questions asked and she was unable to answer most of them.

As a result, I switched gears and we moved to listening/reading practice exercises. This website is great because they have variable level readings and with the paragraph for reading there is a listening exercise of someone reading the paragraph so that you can read along while listening. http://www.eslfast.com/begin1/ This was much more level appropriate. We did about 10 short paragraph readings. She picked up probably 20 new words out of the 10 readings. Some of the words were basic such as dangerous, sandcastle, and crumbs. She did very well reading and we had some great discussions. I think we will pick this up and use this website again for reading/listening as well as speaking.