Stan_TP10

Today (08/06) at 9am I met with Yao to help her prepare for an exam. She is taking an oral exam today at 2pm for her teaching assistant program(ETS). She brought some materials that were relevant to the exam. There were three areas specifically that she was having trouble with...

The first of these was a narration exercise. In this exercise a "comic-strip-esque" pictorial story is depicted. The test-taker is asked to describe the scene or tell the story that is depicted in under a minute. The test-taker is given 15 seconds to assess the pictorial. Yao's issue was that she would spend to much time describing the details in each scene rather than focusing on the main points. She is a serious mathematician thereby she is very detail oriented. Though being a detail oriented individual can prove to useful in many circumstances, it was only proving to be an obstacle in this instance. My strategy for helping her overcome this hurdle was to have her scan all the scenes/images quickly before speaking to formulate her thoughts. I asked that she especially focus on the beginning and end of the story. I explained to her that the introduction and conclusion of the story will help you to understand what message is intended, and the body merely bridges these two points. For example, in one story the first image shows two bus boys and a boss at a restaurant. The bus boys are both thinking, "I would like to be a boss one day." The final image shows one of the busboys as a boss, and the other still bussing tables. The images in between depict how they each achieved this outcome (one squandered his money, the other saved). By having her focus first on the main points of the in the first and last image, she understood what needed to be described in the body as well.

Another area Yao was having trouble with was giving directions. In this section of the test the test-taker is given and a map, and has to give instructions on how to get from point A to point B. She was really over-complicating this exercise by using words and phrase which I am sure she learned in a lesson on map reading and directions. I told her to stick to the basics, ie. North, South, East, and West when given the cardinal directions, and left or right when that info is not available. I explained to her that if she is using left and right, to turn the map as if she were the person moving in the direction she was guiding the individual to take. We went through a couple of these scenarios and it seemed as though she felt much more confident.

 Lastly we went over schedule changes. She would be given a schedule for an event, with changes that were made to the schedule. She would have to read and describe the days events and the corrections. I think she was merely having trouble formulating her thoughts. The test-taker is only given a minute to dictate this, so she was eager to start reading this immediately before deciding what she wanted to convey. I explained to her that it will flow best if she paused before each section and formulated her message before speaking. We went over this a few times and it seemed as though she was starting to get the hang of it.

We worked for a little over an hour, and then she had to head to class at the Chem Building. She later informed me that she was no longer required to take the English speaking exam, so unfortunately I don't know the results of our session. Nonetheless, I think it was good practice for both her and I : )