FSU TEFL 120

 Date: June 22 Time: 4:40pm-5:40pm Location: Bubbly Tea  For our last session Melody met at a boba shop and finished up with the last part of the IELTS sample speaking test. She had rewritten her answers from last session, and I helped her correct for grammar mistakes as well as offering new vocabulary that was more contextually appropriate. For instance, she used the phrase “go into society” at one point, and I offered “go into the workforce” as a replacement that more accurately related to the question topic, which was the view on higher education in Taiwan. Additionally, at one point she asked me the difference between “except” and “instead” which at first was a bit challenging to explain, so I first gave her some example sentences off the top of my head before thinking of the explicit, conceptual difference myself. I then explained that we normally use except when something is the ONLY thing that is different, whereas instead is usually used when suggesting a replacement f...

 Date: June 21 Time: 3pm-4pm Location: Hecht House For our last session Sangji and I talked about his recent trip to New Orleans, in which we were able to continue practicing with past tense use. I noticed this time he had a significantly better fluency to his speaking and made less mistakes with present continuous, using past simple instead. We took some time to look at the different places he went to on google maps as he told me about what they did at each location. We also talked about the Southern culture of New Orleans and he mentioned that he tried gumbo and loved it. This led us to further conversation about food, which is when he showed me a common activity in South Korea where people go to restaurants in nature areas like a mountain valley, and the tables are partially submerged in water so you can put your feet in. We talked about the differences in food culture between our countries and how in Korea it is common to order the same things for the whole table family-style. ...

 Date: June 15 Time: 4:40pm-5:40pm Location: Black Dog Cafe For this session Melody and I met at the Black Dog café to work on the first section of part three of the IELTS speaking test. The questions were about her opinion on the education system in Taiwan. This ended up being a very vocabulary-heavy session as we decided to take a step back when I realized that some of the questions had a little too challenging of vocabulary which affected her comprehension of the question. For instance, Melody struggled with understanding “extracurricular”. I took some time to explain it as an activity that is usually done after school and made sure to make the distinction that it something which helps students improve a skill, find an interest or a community. For instance, it is not something like doing homework which is directly related to school. To test her understanding I had her give me examples of extracurricular activities in Taiwan, and she listed soccer, chess and learning different in...

 Date: June 11 Time: 1pm-2pm Location: FSU College of Music For this session I took Melody to the college of music because she had mentioned that she really wanted to go but didn’t know her way around. She wants to get into a master’s program for music therapy, so we went to the music therapy department and walked around the different facilities in the COM. Along the way, I helped introduce a lot of vocabulary/phrases related to her degree that we came across in bulletin boards or signs, such as “concert hall”, “auditorium”, “practice room”, “rehearsal rooms”, “soundproof”, and “checking out” a book. We went into the music library, and she told me about how she is working on improving her academic vocabulary, so this was very helpful to her. We also conversed about the different norms for professor-student relationships in Taiwan vs. America, which is when I explained that in America, email is the most common form of correspondence for a student and professor and having a professor...

Date: June 10 Time: 10am-11am  Location: Hecht House For this session with Melody we continued to work on the IELTs speaking test. We continued to go over her answers to part two, which are usually opinion-based or questions about a personal experience. The questions from the speaking sample were about an influential teacher she had throughout her life, and I corrected her answers with her after she spoke them. Most of her mistakes were tense mistakes, which I highlighted in a google doc and provided corrections for as well as an explanation for why they were wrong. I shared this document with her as well so she could refer to it later. At one point she asked me the difference between these and those, so I took a few minutes to visually explain demonstrative pronouns like these, those, this, and that. I explained that those usually refers to a plural noun that is not immediately in front of us, like “those windows” versus “these pens” which were very close to us on the desk. She un...

 Date: June 8 Time: 3-4pm Location: Hecht House For this session, Sangji and I continued our very engaging conversations about business and marketing. This time around I wanted to help Sangji work on tense use. I have noticed that he tends to use the present continuous tense in place of past simple or past continuous, so to reinforce this during our conversation, I had him tell me 2 things he did that were related to his studies or work back in Korea, to emphasize the use of the past. I then did the same for the present, which is when he told me that he currently has a business here that he started in Korea with his friends. We discussed this further, and I learned he does freelance marketing for tech companies. I thought this was really cool and took this as an opportunity to introduce new vocab like consulting, start-up, passive income, and side gig, which he wrote down in his notes.

 Date: June 8 Time: 4:40-5:40 Location: Hecht House For this session with Melody we continued our practice with the IELTS speaking test. For our activity I prepared 2 sample 7.5 bandwidth score speaking tests I found on an ESL YouTube channel. I gave her a short checklist to refer to before watching the clips and wanted her to look out for things like transition words or idioms. I had her listen to selected parts of the clip and write them down, which she did. She did very well and identified most of the idioms but had trouble understanding their actual meaning. I could tell she was getting a bit flustered as we went through the list, so I paused to explain that although she didn’t know the meaning of each idiom immediately, she could identify when a phrase deviated from its literal meaning which tells me that her listening comprehension is improving. She was more encouraged after this and to make it more manageable, I decided to only focus on a few idioms. This reminded me to alwa...

 Date: June 14 Time: 3-4pm Location: Hecht House For this session Sangji and I continued to talk about marketing and business-related concepts. Our majors are very similar, so this is a good topic for us to find common ground. We continued to talk about marketing theories and stumbled upon the topic of consumers and how they behave. We came to the conclusion that people’s personalities has a lot to do with what they buy. He told me about his class in South Korea where his professor divided the class by their Myers-Briggs personality type and then accurately guessed what their extracurricular activities were. I noticed that he was using the word “judge” and “think” interchangeably at times, so I explained that judging is usually reserved for when we have a strong opinion or “judgement” the noun form of “to judge”. I then had him give me a contextually correct sentence for each, which he successfully did.

 Date: June 6 Time: 3-4pm  Location: Hecht House For this tutoring session Sangji and I deviated from our usual topics and conversed about the political climate of Korea vs America as well as the differences in the military culture. I think this more serious topic allowed Sangji to practice opinion-based phrases and express himself differently than usual. For instance, I asked him what he thought about the movie Parasite and its depiction of South Korea. He told me a little about the class struggles in South Korea and how there is a growing middle class as well as a lot of wealth inequality. During this, I introduced the words “lower class, middle class, and upper class or the commonly used phrase “the 1%””. I also provided linguistic support by writing some opinion phrases down for him to refer to, like “In my opinion, I believe/ I strongly believe, it is my view that…, from my experience” …etc. Towards the end of the session, we talked about the common stereotype of South Ko...

For our conversation topic this tutoring session Sangji and I talked about topics related to marketing and business. Sangji told me about his classes in Korea and the differences between graduate student culture here and in Korea. He told me that in Korea, graduate students are held to a very high standard and graduate life is very stressful. As usual, I corrected only the obvious tense mistakes he made during his explanation or when he hesitated. I noticed that he knew a lot of advanced vocabulary in English related to his field. He explained to me that he was a TA for an English-taught marketing class in Korea. We started talking about theories such as product association and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I helped him learn some of the higher frequency vocabulary related to these concepts, such as consumer, price vs. cost, focus group, and infographic. He was very interested, and I think this new vocabulary helped solidify his contextual understanding of these words he already knew.