FSU TEFL 120

 Sangji and I met at Starbucks this time to continue practicing speaking. On the way there, he told me about his day and that he finally got his license and a car! He showed me his Korean license as well and we compared them, which led to him showing me his Korean doppleganger who turns out to be the owner of a TV network in Korea. We passed the business building on the way there, and he told me he had visited it a few days ago, but hesitated when using "visited". I used this as an opportunity to explain the contextual use of this word and how we usually use it when talking about a new place or landmark, where as for more everyday things we use "went to". He understood this very well. He told me he would like to continue improving his pronunciation, so I thought that minimal pairs would be helpful. I introduced the idea of minimal pairs to him and then had him practice a list of them with me. I noticed he had trouble with the "th" sound. I modeled how your...

 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 descr...

 For my second session with Melody I prepared an activity for her to practice speaking. Melody is very clear about her English goals and seems super driven to achieve them. She said she wants to focus on raising her score on the IELTS in order to get admitted into her Master's program and would like to improve her speaking. For this session, I practiced part one of a sample IELTS test with her. She is already very knowledgable about the exam expectations and good at expressing it, but struggles with some verb tense structure which I helped her with during this session-particularly the difference between past perfect and past perfect continuous. Part one consisted about more general, personal questions that I recorded on my phone for us to review her mistakes. I wanted to focus on fluency of her ideas before we went in and corrected her mistakes. We agreed she would rewrite her responses and then practice speaking them to me without looking at our next session. 

Sangji and I continued our conversation about cars. I had him pretend that I was a car salesman and he was asking about getting a new car. I had him use vocabulary from the previous lesson but barely needed to remind him of it because he remembered a lot of words, and mainly struggled with structuring his sentences. I made sure to correct him on the most important mistakes like tense use. I noticed he has trouble with the different past tenses so I will help him with that more in detail in our future tutoring sessions, but during our conversation I just gave him the correct tense and briefly explained why it was wrong. Sangji is very determined to learn English. I have also noticed that he has good knowledge of some academic words like "alumnus" and "admissions" but struggles with more basic vocabulary. I will focus on these things in our future sessions. 

 For my third tutoring session with Sangji we met at All Saints Cafe since he said he wanted to try out new coffee spots in town. We began our session by just talking about his plans for the upcoming months, and the topic of cars came up. He had previously mentioned that he was getting a new car because it had been hard getting around town without one. This led to a conversation about the DMV in America since he told me he was planning on getting his license. We talked about how in Seoul he used both public and his own transportation, but in America it can be harder to get around without a car. I also learned more about Sangji's hometown outside of Seoul. Since he mentioned he was planning on getting a car, I decided we would focus on some useful vocabulary related to cars/buying a car for this session. First we went over this vocabulary which included some words for car parts that I thought might be difficult for him. I went over any irregular or new pronunciations as well. We als...

Amir and I visited the FSU Rez, which I took as an opportunity to tell him about typical American pastimes, such as “throwing around a football” and barbecuing. Obviously, these are practiced in many other parts of the world, but I found a way to relate it specifically to American culture by explaining the occasions upon which Americans typically do these activities, such as holidays like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Explaining these special days and their histories to Amir was a good way of incorporating American culture in our tutoring sessions, which I think remains faithful to Amir’s initial request when we first met, which was that I show him as much about the American way of life as possible. We also talked about religion and its influence on American holidays and government, as well as those of his home country. Amir used the word “secular” when describing Kazakhstan’s government, which I thought was great, while also noting that the country’s population is mainly Muslim...

For this session with Amir, we looked through the magazines I showed Daniel, which were New York magazine and The New Yorker. We talked about interior design and decoration, furniture, and aesthetics. To practice speaking, I asked Amir to tell me about his own aesthetic preferences, which he said rely mostly on practicality in function and cost. We also talked about politics, because the issue of New York magazine we perused was focused on the possible end of the federal right to abortion in the United States. Amir said he had heard about this, but did not understand it fully. I explained to him a bit about the history of the court case, as well as how the Supreme Court and federal versus states’ rights work in my country. He told me about the oligarchy in Kazakhstan and its relations to Russia, Cyprus, and the Britain, as well as the corruption rampant in the Kazakh government. It was very interesting to hear him articulate his culture’s views on corruption in government. Because we w...