Sarah CP #5

Date/Time: 11 June / 5:30 - 7:30 

Location: Liberty Bar 

Topic discussed: Language Education, travel, etc. 

Cultural and/or linguistic topics you and your partner learned: I picked up Jiwon at her apartment and we went to Liberty to grab drinks. We mainly talked about traveling and places we would like to go. I found out that she has plans to visit New York soon and that she has a lot of experience in traveling already under her belt, including the US (not only FL, but Washington and California as well), Japan, and Turkey. We also discussed English education in SoKo and she told me how commonplace after school programs were -she told me that she began learning English in middle school and began regularly attending a "hak-won" as soon as she started high school. I was surprised to hear about how many schools will require students to stay on campus even after classes have let out strictly to study. It was interesting to hear about both her experience and perspective on education and I'm excited to hear about trip to NY when she gets back!

Sarah TS #10

Date/Time: 9 June / 11:00 - 12:00PM

Location: Tutee's home

Topic/Skill: Reading comprehension

Feedback provided to tutee: PJ and I picked up where we left off last session and read the Hatchet together. I decided that we would take turns reading aloud 2-3 pages at a time since he seemed pretty tired after having just finished up with his math tutor. To check his comprehension, I would ask him to summarize what happened. He had the general idea each time so I would throw in an additional T/F or factual question for him to answer as well.

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: I learned that it's important to assess your tutee's energy level, at least with a younger learner. I didn't want him to become bored or lose interest in reading during our session so I was happy to create a balance between him and I reading.

Sarah TS #9

Date/Time:  9 June / 6:00 - 7:00PM

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Listening

Feedback provided to tutee: For this session with my adult tutee, we decided to practice from the same TOEFL website we used last session. Instead of listening, I went to the speaking subcategory to find prompts to use. I would start the timer on my phone and give her 15 s to read each prompt and 45 s to answer and I noticed her answers seemed to be structured the same each time (e.g. first reason is…. Second reason is….) so I encouraged her to break away from that and try to answer them as if she was telling this to a friend rather than treat it so much like an exam, and that I would correct grammar mistakes for her so she didn't have the same formatting for every question.  

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: Although Nanami understands grammar and formulating "correct" responses, she is not very comfortable trying out new approaches. I want to facilitate creative approaches to answer questions but I need to remember that her purpose for studying English is ultimately for the TOEFL exam and "correctness" is what she wants to achieve.

Sarah TS #8

Date/Time: 4 June / 5:00 - 6:00PM 

Location: Starbucks 

Topic/Skill: Listening comprehension 

Feedback provided to tutee: I met with Nanami for coffee and I brought my iPad so we could continue to listen to audio clips from a TOEFL practice website. Afterwards, I had her answer multiple choice questions that followed, as well as short answer questions to check her comprehension. She did well on the first one, but we went over some slightly more challenging samples where it became necessary that she be given another chance to listen to it a second or third time so she could correct the mistakes in her answers. 

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: She mentioned to me how it is much more difficult for her to focus when the topic is unfamiliar to her and how she is primarily only used to academic language and vocabulary. She told me that her focus is on what will be on the TOEFL and that she is nervous since she's never taken it before.

Jennifer TS#5

Date/Time: June 24, 3:30PM

Location: Tallahassee Mall

Topics: Trade Law, vocab, and a movie

Abdulrahman and I followed up on Saturday to discuss the Trade Law article that I provided him on Friday, found here. http://www.tamimi.com/en/magazine/law-update/section-14/december-january-3/new-saudi-arabia-companies-law-effective-2016.html

As mentioned previously, he was aware of the details regarding the particular law (in arabic) as it was part of his studies and as a result helped him recognize key facts from the article in English, but was not wholly understandable. Many of the words were particular to contracting, companies or legalese, but quite a few of the words were "smarter" variations of words he already knows. I've attached my vocabulary list below that I provided to him Friday at the end of our session. I defined each word, offered part of speech, and offered an example sentence.

We discussed the article again and he mentioned that the vocabulary was of great help to understand more detail in the article. Abdulrahman also referenced a number of the more practical vocabulary words like provision, anticipate, and optimize. He asked questions about some others, such as promulgate and net profit, and how often it is used in daily speech. I informed him that it was more of a written or contract term than a conversational word. He later asked if I could find him a list of regularly used conversational vocabulary so I'm going to look into that for our next meeting Monday evening. I've also got a new article and vocabulary list for him.

After our hour article and vocabulary discussion was over, we went to the theatre and saw Wonder Woman. It was awesome! :)

Jennifer TS#4

Date/Time: June 23, 8PM

Location: Taco Speak

Topics: Trade Law and Vocab


Since both of my tutoring partners have been unavailable, I've decided to tutor Abdulrahman. He and I met at Taco Speak for dinner and tutoring. I found a great article about a Companies Law in Saudi Arabia regarding international trade and new company founding and set up. Since Abdulrahman's degree is in trade law, I thought that the content might be familiar to him, even though it was a somewhat difficult article. http://www.tamimi.com/en/magazine/law-update/section-14/december-january-3/new-saudi-arabia-companies-law-effective-2016.html

He did know the particular law (in arabic) as it was part of his studies and as a result helped him recognize key facts from the article in English. He did his initial read and we discussed what he understood or remembered from the article and then I presented him with the vocabulary that I chose. Many of the words were particular to contracting, companies or legalese, but quite a few of the words were "smarter" variations of words he already knows. I've attached my vocabulary list below. I defined each word, offered part of speech, and offered an example sentence.

We had tacos and Abdulrahman went home with the highlighted article and the vocabulary list which we would discuss again the next day.

Alexa TS #12

Today (6/24/17, 6:00-7:00) I met with Sultan, and we went through some reading passages as well as went over some vocabulary. It took him a little longer to read one of the passages today because I picked some higher level stuff to work on. However, he still did a great job going through it, answering the questions, and summarizing the story. We actually focused on vocabulary for a lot of the time, and we ended up going through 30 vocabulary words. He was actually really grateful that I printed out the vocabulary words for him to keep, and when he brought them back to this tutoring session, he had written the definition in Arabic next to the 30 words. We went through each word, and a lot of them he was able to understand well because he had translated them to his first language. However, there were a few that I guess were translated wrong, but I tried my best to explain those to him. There was one instance where I couldn't understand what he was saying, so he actually used my own strategy and showed me a visual of what he was talking about. When he showed me the visual, I was able to make the connections back to what he was saying. He was saying the word differently than how it would normally be said in English, so that's why that confusion was there.