Manuela TS # 7

 For this session with Melody we continued practicing her answers from part 1 of the speaking test sample. I noticed that she is a bit hard on herself and is very set on wanting to speak like a native speaker, particularly for the exam, so I took a few minutes to try and help her through these expectations and address her concerns. I explained to her that her fluency is actually quite good and I can always understand what she is trying to tell me, and that it is okay to not have perfect pronunciation all the time but rather focus on the communication of her message. I also noticed that perhaps because of this insecurity, she tends to use a lot of filler words like "always" where it may not make contextual sense. As we went over her written answers to the Part 1 questions, I helped her with this goal by reassuring her that her sentences made perfect sense when spoken but gave her suggestions of where to remove filler words or replace them with synonyms. For example, when describing her apartment, she used the word "whizzing" to describe a car "whizzing by". I explained that this made perfect sense but "speeding by" or "zooming by" could also be used, and she told me she liked when I offered synonyms or more natural-sounding words. We also went over recognizing the pattern of an article usually coming before a noun or a modifying adjective+noun, since I noticed she tends to omit these when speaking. 

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