Sarah TS #14

Date/Time: 27 June / 3:15 - 4:15PM

Location: Student Lounge @ CIES

Topic/Skill: Speaking + articles

Feedback provided to tutee: I contacted another student at CIES, Dasom, to see if she would like another tutor. She told me that she definitely wanted more English practice and went on to say that she specifically wanted help with articles and being more comfortable with her speaking. I prepared for her a handout on some basic rules and common mistakes and gave her a moment to look over it and make sure she understood it. Then, we worked on some fill-in-the-blank article questions and paragraphs with omitted articles together. As we went through questions, I was able to reference why each answer was what using the handout and explained any mistakes she made.

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: I learned why articles are particularly difficult for Korean learners -they don't exist in their mother tongue. As a total noob at Korean (and as someone who is currently brushing up on their English grammar to hopefully teach in Korea) this will be helpful to keep in mind.

Samantha TS#15

Date/Time: July 4th, 2017 - 11:00 a.m

Location: Tutee's Home

Topic/Skill: Reading Comprehension

Feedback Provided to Tutee: In this session I had PJ do most of the reading. I have noticed that if PJ is reading, he can pay attention to the story more easily. This session, PJ and I continued reading The River which is a sequel to The Hatchet. As we read, I asked PJ questions on why he thought certain things were happening as well as asked PJ to make predictions on what he thinks might happen later on in the book.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: We took things a little slower today, stopping to talk about the book more often. I think this helped keep PJ engaged. He was a lot more attentive today than he was in our last session.

Samantha TS#14

Date/Time: June 28th, 2017 - 3:00 p.m

Location: CIES

Topic/Skill: Listening

Feedback Provided to Tutee: This week, Seongeun and I worked on listening skills again. Once again, we used a clip from Gilmore Girls. The show so far has provided a lot of new vocabulary terms for Seongeun. It also helps target some of the areas of listening that ESL/EFL students face when listening, such as accents, rates of speech, reduced forms, broken speech, etc.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: Seongeun is able to understand the scenes a lot through physical context clues, such as body language. The show definitely challenges her listening skills. It would be interesting to test her comprehension on a clip from the show if I removed the visual aid and had her just listen to the audio. I may try this strategy in the future.

Alexa TS #15

Today (7/3/27, 6:00-7:00) I tutored Sultan. We focused mainly on vocabulary. He has a whole list of vocabulary verbs that are written in the present tense, past tense, and past participle. I don't understand why he needs to know the words on the list because there are a good amount of words on there that are not commonly used in conversation. Some of the words you would really only hear in certain TV shows or if we were in the past where a lot more formal words were used. Some examples would be beseech and besiege. However, we went over a lot of the words, including the one's that weren't as common, and i just made sure to look up definitions in case i wasn't sure what the word was. A lot of them he was able to understand, so I decided to test him by choosing a word from the list and having him create a sentence with the word. He had some trouble with this, but it's probably because he is still in the process of learning all the words.

Annalise CP #6

Dojun and I talked about the night culture in Korea vs America. This was interesting to me because a lot of drinking depends on your manger in the work place. We talked a lot about office life as well. It was fun to talk to Dojun and I'm glad he took his time to talk with me.

Raleigh TS #16

This last tutoring session with Dasom was a little bit unorthodox since I'm not in Tallahassee anymore. After the TEFL course ended, I had to leave Tallahassee pretty soon, and I didn't get a chance to meet in person with Dasom or Soumaya because they both went on trips to New York. Dasom and my schedules also haven't aligned enough to do a Skype session, so I had her write one page about her trip to New York to tell me about it. She emailed it to me, and we used Google docs so that I could edit it, ask questions, and send it back. She seemed to really enjoy her trip because she said that it's her favorite city that she's visited even though they had to deal with some weather issues. She also missed her flight back, so she stayed a few extra days and got another flight. She said that she was embarrassed about it at first, but she was happy that it happened because it gave her more time to enjoy the city. She even said that they were staying near Times Square (3 of her friends went with her). I'm really glad I got the chance to hear about her trip even though I'm not there, and I think this actually worked really well. She didn't originally tell me that she wanted to work on her writing, but I think she should work on it a little bit more. Any writing assignments she had during our sessions were really hard for her. She doesn't struggle with fluency, but she needs some work on her grammar. She forgets articles, prepositions, and punctuation. Overall, I'm really happy with this session even though it has been very unorthodox, and I'm really happy that I got this chance to get to know her.

Samantha TS#13

Date/Time: June 22nd, 2017 - 11:00 a.m

Location: Tutee's Home

Topic/Skill: Reading Comprehension

Feedback Provided to Tutee: Instead of continuing the book we were reading, I brought along three different book choices for PJ. He ended up choosing a book that is a sequel to the Hatchet. I knew PJ enjoyed the Hatchet, so I brought that book for him intentionally. We read through the two chapters together. 

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: PJ started off well. He was very interested in the book at first, but as we progressed he began to lose focus. I could tell by the time we had finished the second chapter that he had lost focus. I asked him a couple questions about what happened, but he wasn't able to answer them. We quickly reread the parts he missed that were important.