Keira TS #14

Keira TS #14

Date/Time: July 3, 2017 - 4:15pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Review, Will vs. Would, Irregular Words, Question Phrasing

Casias and I met again today, and we discussed several different topics, including the different uses of the words "will" and "would" to convey specific time frames. We focused in on how "will" is used to indicate that something will happen in the future, and one of the uses of "would" can be to indicate that something was a future event at one time, but is now in the past. An example we looked at showed the relationship, as well as the difference, between "She said 'I will visit you,'" and "She said that she would visit me." We also discussed "drink," "drank," and "drunk," which required me to refresh my memory a little, as this verb in particular makes me stop and think when I have to conjugate it. 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: Casias asked about the difference between "will" and "would," at the beginning of our session, which led to our long discussion of the ways in which these words are used. I lingered for a long time on the specific use of "would" described above, because it required a little more thinking to understand and master. We talked at length about the example above as well as coming up with more examples of our own. Another thing we discussed was question phrasing, which we have talked about a little in the past. Casias wanted to know if "Where you been?" was a correct way to phrase his question, so we spent some time discussing why the word "have" is necessary in this example. 

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: In tutoring a student at a more advanced level, like Casias, I sometimes worry about how much I can help, because of how specific his questions can sometimes be. However, while we were talking, I realized that even just being able to spend some additional time talking about little problems he may be having, or explaining a rule in a few different ways until it makes sense can be very useful. 

Kaitlin TS #6

Date/Time:  June 13th, 2017 at 9PM

Location: All Saints Cafe

Topic/Skill: Essay Correction

This session, Saad wanted to go over some of the feedback his teacher gave him on his essay about Orlando for his composition class. Most of the problems he was running into involved prepositions and quantity, in addition to a few minor problems with organization. I also had to explain the difference between tourist and a terrorist, which was a fun moment that got a lot of indignant stares from the people sitting around us. We went paragraph by paragraph as I explained his teacher's corrections and we worked through them together. Then he corrected the errors with my supervision and produced a workable second draft.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned:
Saad struggles with quantity and countable nouns, which messes up his verb conjugation and tenses sometimes. 

Kaitlin TS #5

Date/Time:  May 6th, 2017 at 9PM

Location: All Saints Cafe

Topic/Skill: Pentagon Powerpoint

Saad asked if we could work on the Powerpoint presentation he had due for speech class ahead of time, and I was happy to do so. He was doing a presentation on the Pentagon and needed help on organization and research. We went through what he had so far worked on how he would organize his slides first. After that, I helped him go through online sources and I clarified some confusing statements on the Pentagon's visitor page.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned:
Directly lifting information from websites did not seem to trigger any moral grey area for him when I told him he probably shouldn't do that. I told him to put it into his own words, but he said that he would when he spoke. Short of explaining to him the lengthy history of American copyright culture, it seemed that it was going to be very hard to force him to stop unintentionally plagiarizing when the concept seemed a little foreign. I need to find a better way to address this cultural difference in the future without seeming like I'm admonishing my tutee.

Keira TS #13

Keira TS #13

Date/Time: July 2, 2017 - 3:05pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Review, Giving Directions

In today's session, Casias and I once again took the first part of our meeting to review the things we had gone over in previous sessions, such as the grammar used in "reporter speech." Once we had done some reviewing, he wanted to ask about how to give directions. He told me that, back home, he is often approached by visitors to Kuwait who ask him for directions in English, and he has never been able to provide them with answers. We treated this as a way to practice giving directions as well as go over some prepositions which I have noticed before tend to give him trouble. 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: Casias' initial directions needed more fine-tuning than big changes, but I did teach him the word "intersection," which I am sure he will find useful in the future. He also still has a tendency to leave out articles, which I pointed out. For example, he initially wanted to say "take first left" or "take right" instead of "take the first left" or "take a right," though I pointed out that he could use "turn left/right" without needing an article because of the different way the words are used (the verb "take" with the nouns "left" and right" as opposed to the verb "turn" with the adverbs "left" and "right") in these two versions.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: Today was a good example of a real-world application for some of the things we talk about in these sessions. The exercise of giving directions in a grammatically correct way involved using a number of grammar rules that we have looked at before, but gave it a context that increased the intrinsic motivation behind learning them. Casias wanted to be good at giving directions in English so he can help people find where they are going and use correct grammar when he does. 

Kaitlin TS #4

Date/Time:  May 30th, 2017 at 7PM

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Thesis Statement Exercise

As Saad had expressed a desire to work on thesis statements and I'd seen that he struggled with them last week, I wanted to focus on them this tutoring session. I wrote out a list of topics and the formula that I use to write a thesis statement and organize and essay with. He told me that he usually writes and then "finds" his thesis statement in what he's written for time's sake, and I explained that in the long run, that's actually not an efficient way to write, nor does it lend itself to cohesive organization. Instead, I showed him how to write a thesis statement first and then write an essay off of it, as thesis statements are almost a map for an American essay. I had him pick a topic, tell me three points he wanted to say about it, and then construct a thesis statement from that. To further illustrate my point, I had him write three supporting points for each main point. I then pointed out that he'd essentially just written an essay in under five minutes. At first, he balked a little at it how long it took compared to just writing, but I had him practice it a few times with different topics and he increasingly got faster. Firmly converted to my method, he had me run through every different type of essay to prove it could be applied in every case.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned:
American essay organization is not intuitive and sometimes your students will fight you on things.

Keira TS #12

Keira TS #12

Date/Time: July 1, 2017 - 3:00pm

Location: Starbucks

Topic/Skill: Review, Reporter Speech

Today, I met again with Casias. One of his questions was about how to properly use what he called "reporter speech," which involves conveying what someone else said in the past. In this kind of context, he was confused about how to change the tense, or if it was necessary to do so. I explained the difference between directly quoting someone and summarizing what he or she said (e.g. "Casias asked 'Do we have a test this week?' versus "Casias asked if his class had a test that week."). I also talked about the contexts in which these different ways of reporting what someone else has said are likely to appear. This led to a tangent on what is considered plagiarism in America, and the importance our culture places on crediting outside sources. 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: The topic of reporter speech is an important one to go over, so I had Casias provide me with different examples from his classes. We talked about how the example sentences would change depending on if it used a direct quote or if it was paraphrasing, and we talked about how this affected the tense. I had him come up with several examples that required him to practice changing the tense of the words in order to be grammatically correct and convey the correct meaning.

Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: Much of what I have learned in tutoring Casias is about the importance of practice. The things he has questions about are often problems with very simple solutions that mainly require memorization or continued practice. Therefore, in our sessions, I ensure that we use many examples, I look for new ways to explain things that may click with him more, and I frequently check to make sure my explanations and examples are making sense. 

Kaitlin TS #3

Date/Time:  May 22nd, 2017 at 7PM

Location: All Saints Cafe

Topic/Skill: Essay Correction
Instead of doing the activity I had originally planned, Saad asked if we could go over an essay he had started working on for class. He was not completely done with it, so we worked with what he had.
Feedback Provided to Tutee: 
We mostly focused on organization, thesis statements, and transitions between paragraphs. Saad had a lot of jumbled ideas and phrases with some sharp transitions, so we worked on how to smooth those out and better organize his ideas. I explained to him why it would be confusing to an American reader if he didn't organize his thoughts in a cohesive way. I also had him flesh out his conclusion.
Lesson(s) about Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned:
The American essay style, while intuitive to me, is really not to ESL/EFL students.