Keira TS #8

Keira TS #8

Date/Time: June 11, 2017 - 5:05pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Noun/Adjective Clause Review, Subject/Verb Agreement, Writing English Papers

This session, I met with Casias again. We began our session by reviewing noun and adjective clauses, which we discussed in our last meeting, and Casias seems to have retained what we discussed very well. Once he grasps something, I do not see him struggle with it very much, but he still likes to review what we have previously discussed. Once we had done a brief review, we moved on to looking at an essay he had written in class and some of the comments he received on it. He tends to understand the feedback he receives better when I take a moment to explain his instructors' comments with more detail. He is very fluent when he speaks, but he still struggles with issues such as subject/verb agreement and using the proper tenses. He also asked me about his use of transitional words, and how he can use them more accurately, or if I could recommend other academic words for him to use to improve his writing. In the last few minutes of our session, he asked about the phrases "We ran out of time," and "We have run out of time," and if he was using them correctly. 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: Casias and I spent most of this session looking over an essay he had written and the comments he received on it. The things I see him struggling the most with are subject/verb agreement, tense agreement, use of articles, and occasionally pronoun/antecedent agreement. When I encounter one of these errors, I always point it out to him, though he sometimes catches these errors himself, and explain the reason or reasons it is incorrect, and we then discuss what the correct version is. Many times, he is able to correct the problem without me helping, and seems to look to me for reassurance more than anything else. This makes me believe that he does actually understand most of these rules, and needs to practice them in order to struggle with them less.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: I have noticed that both Hani and Casias have a very keen interest in learning new English idioms. It is likely very frustrating to hear English words you understand, yet have the context make no sense to you, and conversely it is probably very satisfying to be able to understand and use phrases in the same way that native speakers do. From time to time I catch myself using idioms when speaking to either Casias or Hani, and in particular with Casias, since he comes across as very fluent. When I do this, I am usually asked to explain what I just said, or I will offer up any explanation myself. Today I used the phrase "off the top of my head" while speaking, and I devoted some time to explaining its meaning, as well as similar words and phrases, until Casias seemed comfortable with its use. 

Keira TS #7

Keira TS #7

Date/Time: June 9, 2017 - 6:30pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Listening/Note-Taking, Vocabulary

This was another session with Hani. I wanted to go back to our listening and note-taking exercise from some of our previous sessions. Unlike the last time we did this, I had picked a higher level video for him to watch. I picked a news video about the United States leaving the Paris Agreement, since it is a recent issue that is relevant not only to the United States, but to all the other countries involved. I thought the video would work well for this type of exercise due to the slow, deliberate rate of speech used. I identified some words that I believed would most likely be new vocabulary for Hani, so that we could go over them before I showed him the video. However, even after looking at these new vocabulary words (such as "withdraw" and "negotiate"), we realized that there were still more words used in the video with which Hani was unfamiliar. We took some time to discuss several new words, ranging from contest to renegotiate. Hani and I do not normally spend this much time on new vocabulary, but he always wants to learn new words, and ultimately I think it was a very good discussion, especially since many of the words we discussed he can use later in academic writing. We ended our session by talking about a couple of phrases and idioms. Hani had had questions about the phrase "have half to go" because of the confusing nature of the words "have" and "half" used so closely together, and we discussed a couple of new idioms that came up during our discussion. The most prevalent of these was probably "Life's not fair," which came from our discussion of the term "fair" as it was used in the video. 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: When it came to the actual note-taking and listening practice, Hani did not have much trouble with the comprehension questions I had prepared for him, except for the places where the new vocabulary caused him difficulties while listening. As usual, I had him watch and listen to it once, discuss it with me, and watch and listen to it again, and his comprehension was higher the second time. He was able to understand the vocabulary in context better once we had discussed it a little and provided more examples. His note-taking itself is still a little slow, so videos with a slow speech rate are still the most appropriate for his level. Overall, however, he has a good idea of what are the most important things to write down while listening, so he is usually well equipped to answer most of my comprehension questions after the video.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: When I was selecting this video, I knew it would present some new words to Hani, but it had just a few more vocabulary words which he was unfamiliar with than I had expected. I was a little surprised to find that even the word "fair," which I had considered fairly high frequency, needed a brief explanation. However, he understood this word in context very, very quickly. It seems that I am having a little bit of trouble finding videos for this exercise that are right in the range of what would be the most appropriate for his level. However, he was still able to both practice these skills and learn new vocabulary and idioms, so he was satisfied at the end of our session. In the future I want to make even better use of our time, however. 

Keira TS #6

Keira TS #6

Date/Time: May 29, 2017 - 7pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Noun, Adjective, and Adverb Clauses

This was my second tutoring session with Casias. We revisited his question from our first session together about the difference between noun clauses and adjective clauses. This led to us looking at adverb clauses, as well. I had used the time in between our sessions to ask Dr. Kennell for advice on differentiating between these different types of clauses, and he had recommended some useful online sources to me, which I had looked through in preparation. We discussed the differences in these three types of clauses, looked at online examples, and came up with more examples of our own. I also had Casias identify what type of clause was being used from some of the examples online, which he did without much trouble. During the rest of our session we addressed other questions as they came up, such as the difference between using a colon and a semicolon, and the difference between the word "along" and the phrase "a long." 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: Most of the feedback I provided today was in the context of correcting the errors Casias made when speaking or making examples, and explaining which answers were correct and why. Most of this happened while discussing the different clauses. I explained the uses and rules of these clauses in a few different ways, pausing to ask if anything was unclear, before we would move on to making examples or identifying which clause was being used in an example.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: Casias has many questions about the specifics of grammar, and many of them require me to do some further research of my own, because he is fluent enough to be asked somewhat more advanced questions. However, he seems to understand many of these concepts fairly quickly when we spend a little extra time on them, or I explain them in a few difference ways and offer different examples. He still seems very eager to learn more, though I think perhaps sometimes his eagerness turns into a state of almost rushing through studying. 

Jennifer TS#11

Date/Time: July 4, 11:30AM

Location: Southwood Community Center

Topics: Fourth of July Activities


I picked up Abdulrahman so that we could go to one of the 4th of July Festivals in town so that he could experience some of the activities that are traditional for the holiday. We chatted on the way about things that people do on Independence Day like have cookouts (hamburgers, hotdogs, watermelon), spend time with friends, do face painting, attend parades, playing games, have a party at your home, shoot fireworks, have pie/hotdog eating contests, etc. https://fun4tallykids.com/calendar/eventdetail/213857/-/southwood-celebration-of-the-red-white-blue 

We arrived at the Southwood Community Center and there were lots of tents set up with different activities, food trucks, face painting, balloon animals, people dressed as American icons...We walked around the park area and observed all of the red, white, and blue decorations. Stopped at the tents and Abdulrahman asked me what the people were doing. Some of the kid were playing corn-hole (beanbag toss), playing a spin the wheel game, painting rocks, throwing water balloons, etc. There were people on stilts dressed up like the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam. Abdulrahman asked me who they were supposed to be and why. I told him that the Statue of Liberty is supposed to be a symbol of freedom for our country and that is why the girl was dressed up. There was also a small Lady of Liberty statue for people to get pictures with. We stopped at a food truck and got an ice-cream since it was so hot and continued to walk around. 

There were people having a pie eating contest, children were having balloons twisted into swords, hats or animals, and some others were getting their faces painted. I was unsuccessful in convincing him to paint his face. I think he had a good time for his first 4th of July. He told me that he was going to go with friends to buy some fireworks in the afternoon to celebrate.

Jennifer TS#10

Date/Time: July 3, 7:30PM

Location: Phone

Topics: Daily Events and 4th of July Article

I called Abdulrahman to talk about an article I sent him and to see how his day was. He had plans on Sunday to attend a church service with a friend to experience a Christian church. He was excited about it , but a little apprehensive so I assured him to just be polite to people and to be himself and everyone should be friendly and nice. Unfortunately, his friend changed plans and he wasn't able to go. He is hoping to go next weekend.

Here is the ESL article that I found about Independence Day. http://www.elcivics.com/esl_fourth_of_july.html I wanted to send him an article about the Fourth of July so that he would know what the holiday was about since the holiday is such an integral part of American history. He read the article and asked me questions about it like why we celebrate the specific day and what people do for the holiday. I explained to him that we celebrate it because it is Independence Day because it celebrates our freedom from England. We talked about what people do on the 4th of July. I told him that people have cookouts (hamburgers, hotdogs, watermelon), spend time with friends, do face painting, attend parades, playing games, shoot fireworks, have pie eating contests, etc. He told me that fireworks are illegal in Saudi Arabia now because a kid died playing with them at a celebration after Ramadan. He also mentioned that he is afraid of fireworks because they are dangerous. We made plans to go to one of the 4th of July celebrations in town so that he could see everything in person. 

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.

Sarah CP #6

Date/Time: 29 June / 1:00 - 2:15PM

Location: Lucky Goat Coffee Co. 

Topic discussed: NYC and travel, English and Korean 

Cultural and/or linguistic topics you and your partner learned: My conversation partner and I are both coffee addicts so I took Jiwon to what is arguably the best local coffee shop in town, Lucky Goat. We mainly chatted about her recent trip to NYC and how she had made a of list of specialty coffee shops to hit up while she was there. It was interesting to hear that NYC reminded her a lot of Seoul. Her and her friends did the stereotypical tourist attractions and activities as well, such as going to the top of the Empire State Building and visiting Central Park.  She shared some pictures and I told her about wanting to go to Korea asap. We then talked about English class and tests in Korea and she showed me some YouTube videos about what English speakers think about Korean-English tests after taking a sample exam. As we have heard in class, Soko's English education system is mostly fixated on rote memorization, and their testing system reflects this in that, according to Jiwon, tests are typically fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice with little to no short answer/ free response questions. You would think this means that they are easy…but come of the reaction videos of native-English speakers taking an advanced English level exam proved otherwise. Anyway, this may have been my last "blogged session" with my conversation partner but I'm sure we'll continue to hangout this summer! P.s Happy 4th, ya'll~*