FSU TEFL 120

I met with my student Hyobin over Zoom on Monday, September 19th. I had prepared a presentation about prepositions for that day, but I asked Hyobin if there was something else she would prefer to focus on instead. I wanted to make sure she had the opportunity to ask any questions she had in our remaining two tutoring sessions. Hyobin asked me to help her with a homework assignment creating compound sentences from vocabulary. As we worked on crafting sentences, I noticed that, while Hyobin could define an independent clause, she often struggled to create a sentence with two independent clauses. I tried to give her as much practice and examples as possible to help her better understand the concept in practice. 

I met with Hyobin over Zoom on Thursday, August 15 th . Like last time, we spent this tutoring session working on a homework assignment. I believe that assisting Hyobin with homework is helping me practice guiding a student to the correct answers without just sharing them. Hyobin had to write sentences with vocabulary using simple subject and simple predicate. I will admit that I quickly looked up the definition of both terms to make sure I was giving Hyobin correct information. (I believe that it is better to be honest with a student if I am unsure about anything rather than passing along false information. I would also hope that it might help by showing them that language-learning is a continuous process, one which even native speakers are always engaging in.) After that, we worked on the sentences together.

Hyobin and I met over Zoom on Monday, September12 th . Unfortunately we had a longer break between sessions than expected because she had wifi problems Thursday, Sept. 8th. Today she asked me for assistance with a homework assignment, so we spent the majority of our session working on it. Hyobin had to write a series of compound sentences using an article about the movement of boats through canals. This assignment coincidentally happened to be a good test for Hyobin to practice writing different sentence structures. I did not have Hyobin’s article in front of me to read, but she typed out the relevant parts of it in the Zoom chat. We went over the components of a compound sentence and then Hyobin tried drafting her own sentences in the chat.

I met with Hyobin over Zoom on Thursday, September 1 st . We discussed next week and agreed that we will not meet on Labor Day because it is a holiday for Hyobin. We spent the rest of the tutoring session doing more practice with writing sentences and using punctuation. I have discovered that continuously having Hyobin practice writing and send it to me in the Zoom chat during a meeting seems to keep her engaged in subject and retaining information.

I met with Hyobin over Zoom on Monday, August 29 th . We spent today’s tutoring session completing a lesson about sentence structure. I began by asking Hyobin to define simple and compound sentences to check her comprehension of the lesson so far. After we finished the presentation, Hyobin asked me if I could help her with a homework assignment requiring her to write sentences using vocabulary words. She asked me what a word meant, and I tried to guide her to the answer by breaking the word down into components that she was already familiar with, instead of giving her the answer outright.

I met with Hyobin over Zoom on Thursday, August 25 th . I wanted to build upon our previous work with punctuation so I presented a lesson on sentence structure today. I planned to introduce the four main sentence types (simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex) and ask Hyobin to write me sample sentences after each explanation. I also made sure not to take her knowledge of grammar concepts for granted—stopping to go over vocabulary like independent and dependent clauses and conjunctions. I am trying to strike a balance between teaching practical use of English and teaching grammar patterns during our tutoring sessions. We made it about halfway through my presentation and will complete it next time.