Charlie - TS#10

Date/Time: Thursday, June 3, 9:00 a.m. 

Location: Zoom 

Topic/Skill: Listening Practice, Memorial Day Cultural Lesson

Feedback Provided to Tutee: As Memorial Day was this week, I wanted to give DoJun a glimpse into American culture. We started this lesson with 10 minutes of cultural education, where I explained to DoJun the various ways in which Americans honor veterans. We talked about things like the song "taps", the Arlington Veteran Memorial Site, and Ronald Reagan. We then proceeded to watch a short speech by Ronald Reagan that was given on Memorial Day years ago. It was a moving speech and truly encapsulated what this holiday is all about. I instructed him to not try to dissect every single word but rather try to pull the main points from the speech and attempt a summary at the end. After going through the video, we had a short discussion around what Ronald Reagan was talking about and I encouraged him to talk about as much of the video as he could remember, even if he was just making guesses. Following this, we went through some of the tough vocabulary and grammar that was found in this speech. I explained to him that much of the language found in the video would not typically be found in casual speech because it was older footage and meant to be flowery for the sake of the speech. 

Lessons about the tutoring and/or the tutee that you learned: I felt happy with the schema building activity within this lesson. I found that DoJun was more interactive after having more of a background on the origins and activities associated with Memorial Day. I will attempt to integrate similarly engaging schema building activities into future lessons. I also saw that the flowery language found in the speech that is typical of poetry and older literature was fairly confusing for DoJun as there were a few uncommon grammar structures in the script. Ensuring that this type of language is not commonly found in typical conversations was an important part of my lesson. I allowed him to see the physical script at the end of the lesson and I believed this to be helpful after he was able to synthesize all the details associated with it.