Jackson_TP2

On Wednesday I met with one of our classmates, Fei, who I agreed to tutor after she expressed an interest in having us help her with our English. As with many of our Tutoring Partners, our first meeting was certainly less structured than the meetings to follow. We met at a restaurant called "Far East Cuisine" where Fei introduced me to Vietnamese Pho. From our conversation, it seemed that Fei was having a lot of trouble with participles (in particular past participles). I did my best to differentiate between some of the words she was unclear with as well as provide her with additional examples and guidance about how to use past participles correctly, but I soon realized that for her to be able to understand these grammar rules completely I would have to postpone the lesson until next time when I was much more prepared. Another thing that Fei wanted to work on was her Vocabulary. I told her that  learning vocab (like Snow says in his coinciding chapter) is not a matter of studying words, but rather assimilating them from everyday interactions and reading. Being an English major, words are what I'm most concerned with. I tried to incorporate words into our conversation that were synonymous with words that I thought Fei would already be familiar with, and after using them I would explain to her what they meant. After a great dinner and even better conversation (Fei taught me a lot about Chinese history and culture, as well as why the Chinese and Japanese governments are not currently on the best grounds) we ended our lesson by going over Fei's Writing Lesson Plan. I asked her to read along with me what she had submitted and began asking her questions about the identification of her errors in grammar and sentence structure. Unsurprisingly, she picked them up almost immediately and all I needed to do was give her some technical explanation and alternatives to help her. We agreed that part of our upcoming tutoring sessions would include reviewing and editing her lesson plans so as to buff up her writing skills. All in all, the dinner and company were great and the lesson plan went much better than I could have even hoped. I look forward to meeting with Fei again tomorrow!