Brian_TP6

This past Wednesday I met with Mr. Sung Kim at the Leon County Public Library for a tutoring session. We met for the first time on Monday for introductions, etc., so this was our first actual tutoring session. During our initial meeting, he said he wanted to work primarily on speaking and listening, given that he had taken many English classes in South Korea and had practiced writing and grammar. I began by playing about half of the audio (about 2 minutes) to a news story from the VOA website while he took notes. I then asked him some comprehension questions, which he answered easily. We repeated this exercise with a second story (both articles were on the subject of education - Mr. Kim is a professor of civil engineering in South Korea, so I thought they would be of interest to him) only this time, instead of questions I asked if he could summarize the story. He did this very well, only having trouble with some proper nouns, like the names of specific companies. While we were discussing the articles, I wrote down the vocabulary words that he asked me about, and asked him to look them up for homework. Given that he seemed proficient in listening to the slower speaking on the VOA website, we tried listening to a story from NPR. This proved to be too fast for him, a fact that seemed to arouse some frustration. I assured him that it was alright and that he was doing very well, and we moved on to a speaking exercise. I used one from the Snow book and asked him to describe his apartment in Tallahassee as well as his apartment in South Korea in order to practice explaining things using directional adjectives like "in front of, behind, next to" etc. Following this, I asked him to tell me about some of his favorite activities with the intention of reviewing gerunds.

This seemed to be my most productive tutoring session to date, and the most interesting observation to me was about time management. During a one-on-one tutoring scenario with a student who is fairly proficient in the skills you are covering, it's possible to go through several types of exercises very quickly. Fortunately, Mr. Kim most wants to practice speaking and listening, so filling up the extra 15 minutes we had with conversation was easy. In a large class, however, this probably wouldn't be an option, but then again a large class wouldn't have gotten through all of the activities as quickly. What I learned is to check the time periodically throughout the class and adjust the length of each exercise accordingly.