FSU TEFL Certificate 2021 Summer 1

  Date/Time: 9/10/2021 9:00 p.m. Location: Conversation over Line Topic/Skill: Listening comprehension and idiomatic language Feedback provided to tutee: Since the semester has started I have less time to prepare more detailed lesson plans catered towards what Tina would like to study for. However, in order to still help her get some practice in despite my inability to prepare a new lesson, I decided to use one of the lessons I had made for our TEFL class as a filler for this meeting. Since it was one of the best lessons I was a part of, and is an area in which Tina could use some work, I decided to use the listening comprehension lesson I made with Charlie. Like in our original lesson I gave her a brief intro to English idioms and reduced forms of speech. I gave the dicto-comp like we did in class, once slow, once at a more normal speed. After which I had her try her best to explain what happened in the dialogue and give me her guesses as to what certain words and phrases meant. I...

Date/Time: 08/07/21 10:00 AM Location: Conversation  over Line  Topic/Skill: TOEFL Writing Prep, Free Talk Feedback provided to tutee: Since I had started talking with Yenzhou in a teaching capacity and not just as friends he has expressed a great desire  to practice his English as much as he can. To this end, I had him start keeping a daily journal in English. He has done a very good job with keeping up with it and he feels it has really helped his writing  ability. This meeting however; I wanted to put his new found writing  skills to the test, so jumped straight into an opinion essay. Yenzhou did very well, he only had minimal grammatical or spelling errors and elaborated well on his topic. After the essay we decided to chat. Since Yenzhou wants to start speaking more colloquial  English he asked me to teach him some American slang. After happily obliging  he taught me some Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese slang as well. Lesson(s) about tut...

Date/Time: 08/12/21 9:00 PM Location: Conversation over Line  Topic/Skill: Writing Practice for TOEIC/ TOEFL Feedback provided to tutee: Since  Tina had expressed a desire to focus on speaking when we were first introduced it was what we had primarily  worked on up to this point. However; this week I wanted to try to gauge her other English skills and see where they were at. We started with a type of question that displays a picture and two words. The student is supposed to describe the image in one sentence and use the given words in the sentence. Tina did fairly well with this style of question. Most of her answers were grammatically correct with only minor errors. Although, her answers were all relatively  short and not very descriptive. After the photo questions we moved on to the opinion essay. Tina did have more errors in this longer form of writing, but I was happy to see that she was able to self correct many of them as I read through the essay allowed....

Date/Time: 08/03/2021 10:00 PM Location: Conversation  over Line Topic discussed: Video games, Mahjong, The Olympics Cultural and/or linguistic topics you and your partner learned: I was excited for our conversation  this time because  it had  been a while since me and Zhewei had a chance to chat. He recently moved and started a new job so he hasn't had to much free time to talk. He filled me in on what he had been doing and was curious how I had been spending my summer vacation. After I had told him it was mostly sleeping and playing video game our conversation moved in that direction. Zhewei told me about a lot of different games I had never heard of that were all developed in Taiwan. He also told me about which video games are most popular in Taiwan right now. However; Zhewei says that the only video game he really plays is online Mahjong. Since I have never had the chance to learn Zhewei taught me how to play. He did a very good job of explaining the r...

  Date/Time: 08/05/21 9:00 P.M. Location: Conversation over Line Topic/Skill: Reading comprehension, TOEIC Opinion Questions Feedback provided to tutee: This session we worked primarily on reading comprehension and deterring  the meaning of words  based on the context they are in. I did my best to try to find some readings that would be considered intensive, but I must admit I ended up setting the bar a bit too low. Tina had a pretty easy time reading through the texts I provided, only having the occasion hang up on larger words. Though; I did take the few chances I had to have her guess the meanings of the words she did not originally know. She did well with extracting the meaning but what made me even happier was to see her speaking more and more. Her fluency has improved tremendously since we first began. While her number of grammar errors  has increased  slightly, I would call this a fair trade off for the time being for her increased confidence and fl...

  Date/Time: June 30th, 2021 Location: Zoom Topic/Skill: Sarcasm  Feedback provided to tutee: For this tutoring session, I provided feedback mostly on Hang ah's pronunciation and grammar in use. To begin the lesson I asked an introduction question and then we watched a youtube video for our activity,  After, we went over what we learned in the lesson and I corrected her pronunciation throughout the time.   Lessons about tutoring and/or tutee you learned:  Hang ah found sarcasm to be very funny and often questioned whether sarcasm was too mean. It was interesting to see how different to the two of us sarcasm was from a cultural perspective.