Jenna CP#1

8/31, 6pm, Atomic Coffee on Call Street.

     I met with my Conversation Partner today. In short, she was totally awesome. The long version is that I first ordered a tea, she said hello to some friends she recognized, and then we sat down to chit-chat. We had the usual introductions, mainly where I asked my CP if she was sure I was pronouncing her name correctly. It was easy to chat with my partner, as she was full of energy and great conversation! She asked me to correct her English as we went along, and we delved right into things.

     We chatted about her family in China, where her mother and father live. My CP actually speaks 3 dialects of Chinese- Mandarin, and the native dialects of her mother and father's hometown! She has 2 siblings in the UK at the moment, and finds that British english is sometimes confusing for her because of the accents and various colloquialisms. Her hopes for Tallahassee include passing her TOEFL with a score of 100 and gaining a Master's degree in Accounting (get it, CP!). My CP told me that written grammar is her strong suit, but that she struggles with speaking.

     After hearing some of my partner's horror stories about college town bars, I gave her the names of some not so sleazy local watering holes. We had a great time discussing public transportation in urban areas, boys, and the lack of Chinese restaurants in Tallahassee. One thing that hit me hard were my CP's stories about when she first came to the United States (8 months ago!). She told me she didn't understand anyone or anything, and that they didn't understand her. Just making her connecting flights from Seattle to Atlanta were nerve wracking and troublesome experiences. When she arrived at FSU she told me that she shyly went to the Student Union because she was hungry, but found she didn't know how to order food or how to pay with American dollars- luckily, she was aided by a fellow Mandarin speaking student. My partner really opened up to me and said that many nights she would go to class and then go home and cry because she could not communicate with those around her and felt alienated. Most heartbreakingly, she told me some of her fellow classmates told her to pick an English name, because it is easier for others. That is something I feel is completely Eurocentric and unnecessary. If others can learn to pronounce the name Oglesby in Oglesby Student Union, then we can certainly learn to say a person's name no matter how different.

     My CP told me her name is a powerful name in Chinese culture. She told me her name is from Ancient China and that when people hear it, it comes with expectations. My partner said that when some teachers call roll and others hear that a woman's name is the name she has, they will silently scoff or give shifty eyes because they think it's too powerful a name. She then told me that where she is from, when you "grow up" or become of a certain age, your parents will give you a new name. She said she is waiting for her father to give her hers. When I asked if she wanted it to be a powerful name or a softer name she said it didn't matter, because "water is soft, but it is the strongest force there is." My CP is seriously amazing.

     Language wise, my partner is very fluent in english and enrolled in upper level CIES classes. She does seem to struggle with putting the 's' on plural nouns and using the past tense of "to go" (she will say "we go" as past tense instead of "we went"). Her pronunciation, which was something she was worried about, was not as bad as she was making it to be and will definitely get better over time.

Anna TP # 1

Anna Prorok

August 31, 2014

TEFL Tutor Session No. 1

Atomic Coffee,  W Call Street

This was my first tutoring session with Abdul Alzahrani. Abdul is attending CIES in order to succeed in his Master’s program at Jacksonville University. He passed the GRE and was admitted to the university on the terms of his completion of the CIES course. He will attend Jacksonville University starting in the spring. Nina Trolley did not attend because she could not make it.

We worked together for a little over an hour at Atomic Coffee. Today was mainly an introductive day where we talked about ourselves and got to know one another. He is from Saudi Arabia and has two sons and a wife here with him in Tallahassee. He is very eager to learn English and wants to practice on his speaking and listening skills the most. He says he is good at grammar, but struggles with things such as listening to other people speak. He especially wants to practice taking notes from listening for when he starts attending university. He struggles with academic English more than anything. He really wants to engage with other people in conversation and be immersed in an American household to really get a good experience learning English and be forced to speak the language. I asked him a lot of questions about himself and what he likes doing. Questions I asked ranged from when he moved to Tallahassee to what is his favorite food. He showed me pictures of the different Arabic cuisine he enjoys cooking and how it is done. He talked to me a little bit about Arabic culture. He asked questions about me as well, and I showed him photographs of the house I grew up in as well as some of my family members. His speaking skills are adequate and mainly needs help with pronunciation. I can understand most things he says through context, but he wanted me to correct him when he made a mistake. I made sure he told me if I was speaking too quickly or if phrases I said were too difficult for him to understand. It is always interesting speaking with a non-native speaker. I had to catch myself on multiple occasions from using idioms that I realized wouldn’t make sense. When I was talking about my major I said, “We touched on Central Asian history” and Abdul’s face was incredibly puzzled and I corrected myself with a statement that made more sense to him. I really enjoy this tutoring because it forces me to be more conscious of my speaking and how to make it more understanding for someone else.

We are planning on meeting at least one day a week but he seemed eager to meet more than once. I am hoping to have a one-on-one session with him on Sundays and then meet with Nina and Abdul as well on Tuesday evenings. The next time we meet I am going to bring picture books from the library with elementary text for him to read. I am also going to give him an English diagnostic exam to be able to gauge where he is at in regards to learning the English language. Altogether it was a really great meeting and I look forward to meeting with him again. I wanted today to have more of an introductory approach, and I think I executed that well. He seems very eager to learn and I am excited to introduce him to some local, Tallahassee/American places around town and work on hands-on tutoring in areas that Abdul needs help in the most.  

Savannah TP #1

I Skyped with Jung, Jun's mother for a while before talking to Jun.   She told me that she wanted me to just talk to him to improve his vocabulary and ability to elaborate on answers.   She said that his grammar is very good and he is good at writing as well.  She said he is ahead of his classmates in those areas due to his time in Florida.


When I talked to Jun, I noticed that his grammar was good and he could understand me most of the time.   Sometimes he didn't understand some vocabulary I used so I would phrase a sentence differently.  Other times would say "I can't explain it in American."  I would encourage him to try and throw out some vocabulary or suggestions.  Other times his speaking was slow and the sentences were not flowing fluently.  I could see the ease that came with talking about subjects he liked such as tae kwon do and playing with his brother Kevin. It seems to me like the course of action for improving his vocabulary is getting him to talk about subjects that he likes and tell me more about them.


For our next tutoring session I will come up with conversational questions and have him elaborate.  I want to ask him follow up questions and give him pictures and scenarios to explain to me.  I have enjoyed tutoring him so far, he is a sweet boy!

Logan_TP#2

J Logan Matthews
TP#2
Aug. 29, 2014 (4:30-6:00)
Dirac Science Library, Strozier Library, and In between

Alba Montoya, my second tutee of the evening was quite a bit more challenging for me than the first. She comes from Columbia to learn English in order to pass the TOEFL test, to be conditionally admitted to FSU's Chemistry Master's program. She had been learning English for two years prior to attempting the CIES program but the courses only taught her vocabulary and grammar. Therefore, she wants to focus mainly on her Speaking and Listening skills.

Alba's reading and writing ability is quite good aside from the verb tenses which she quickly corrects. Her listening vocabulary appears to be very large as well. She told me that she has published three articles on chemistry in an international journal of chemistry which were written in English. I found this quite impressive as I have some idea of the difficulty in academic publishing as my stepfather is a Professor of Entomology. However, she is very reticent when it comes to speaking English. 

Because of her shyness in communicating verbally I mentioned that I had a basic understanding of Spanish from high school. In hindsight, I think I should not declare such items because I am nowhere near the level required to produce useful translation from Spanish. However, I think studying the major differences in syntax between the Spanish and English Language will be helpful in this case. Two theories mentioned in class come to mind when considering her situation, "Interlanguage" and the "Affective Filter." Interlanguage applies because I can remember from learning Spanish how one can become complacent because it is easy to use cognates and machine translation to rapidly build up your vocabulary to construct a sentence that may be grammatically correct in English but requires extensive rephrasing to sound correct in spoken Spanish. The Affective Filter applies because throughout most of the conversation Alba seemed to me to be too nervous to reply with more than yes or no head movements and confirming noises than risk a sentence. 

It certainly did not help that I probably planned the session too late for a Friday because both libraries at FSU close early on Fridays. We ended up trying to work in three different locations as well as enduring regular interruptions from the intercom requesting that people leave the library early. There was also some trouble with her FSU card when entering and exiting the library as well as understanding what the FSUID was. I planned our next session for earlier in the day at the Hecht house so hopefully there are fewer interruptions.

While we were walking between libraries and sitting at a outside bench I tried to think of speaking games to improvise. I tried to do an eye spy based on colors in the environment but she seemed too embarrassed by playing a children's game for me to think immediately of how to make it more advanced by constructing a conversational phrase on the environment. Because of the disorder in setting I couldn't rely on diagrams as much as I did with my first tutee but she would write out what she wanted to communicate while I sounded it out for her. She had requested that I speak as often as I can so I also would sound out the words when I wrote a phrase. 

The most difficult aspect of the situation came from her claiming to understand something I said with a nod or quiet "yes," when she would later describe how I wasn't making sense. I tried to coach her to let me know clearly by saying "I'm confused" or "I understand what you're saying," but she seemed reluctant to comply.

I came away from the experience largely perplexed because I need to find a way to elicit her to speak more but in a level she can comprehend. I remember that we made some progress talking about how the weather in Columbia compares to our own and it seemed that I was able to coax out some genuine smiles when explaining why English is a difficult language to speak rather than write. Hopefully I can find some progressive speaking drills to use that also relate to her interests in American music as well as the few topics she mentioned. She claims to know the basic conversational phrases to use when ordering food but I need to get her to demonstrate it through speaking. 

Logan_TP#1

J Logan Matthews
TP#1
Aug. 29, 2014 (2:30-4:30)
Dirac Science Library

Haonan Hu or Winnie (from Winnie the Pooh), as she had me address her, is from Shanghai in mainland China. Winnie is studying English to reach a ILETS score of 6.5 or TOEFL score of 80. ILETS is apparently the British equivalent to the TOEFL in the U.S. as she tells me. She wants to score high enough to pass admission into a university dance program.

I asked questions about her background and progress in studying English. She had been studying English for three months before attempting the CIES program. She placed high in composition and reading, but low in speaking and listening. Winnie later told me that she wants to focus on the practice of conversational English first.

I slowly gleaned information on how she learns English outside of the CIES classes. Winnie was able to show me her methods which involved memorizing vocabulary from a bilingual workbook which included a pronunciation CD. I made sure to stress the importance of hearing samples of proper pronunciation and demonstrated my current favorite tool for testing new words and phrases with the Google translate web-app. She showed me how she already uses an app on her smartphone as a dictionary which includes the sound of pronunciation. Besides the workbook she also watches the American shows "Friends" and "Modern Family" with bilingual subtitles added. I mentioned that some video players have options to slow down playback if it becomes confusing.

For conducting a needs analysis, I explained to her the colloquial definition of the shows she was using which was "sitcom." I explained the full definition of the phrase as situational comedy, that is situational (like real life) comedy (makes them laugh). I was prompted to improvise this because of her reply to the question, "Why did you choose these shows?" which was "It is close to life." I thought of elaborating on the lesson by introducing the term "v.s." or versus by comparing and contrasting a sitcom with a documentary. That is a sitcom is a record (with a camera) that imitates real life whereas a documentary is a record that is from real life. I demonstrated how to construct a conversational sentence for versus that included participles and the indefinite article.

Whenever she was confused on a definition I was able to relate it to a physical object, a kinesthetic motion, or a diagram on paper. Although I did begin the lesson 30 minutes before the scheduled time of 3PM the primary reason why it lasted longer than normal was because we kept breaking off the main idea into little tangents to properly illustrate the concepts (I was called the Master of Digression in my early college English classes). I can say that I was having a great deal of fun in the process while I was making sure to keep Winnie engaged in the explanation.

In developing some topics for our next meeting, I determined from her interests that Winnie would like to work on the conversational topics of "Gifts Giving and Receiving," as well as "Describing Life-Changing Events." I think we developed an excellent rapport in the session and she was a pleasure to work with. Because the session lasted so long, she eventually was showing signs of fatigue in her posture so I saw that as a sign to wrap up, but by that time my next tutee in line had appeared for her session and they recognized each other from one of the CIES classes. Winnie would like to do group sessions in the future but I am unsure if I can accommodate her because of the learning differences in my tutees but I will try to make it happen.

Gale_TP#1

Gale Workman

TP#1

Aug. 28, 2014/noon-1 p.m.

Hecht House

Jianwei Zhang, from southern China, is attending CIES through December 2014 because she has been conditionally accepted into FSU's grad program in integrated communication. Jianwei said her TOEFL scores are low and FSU is the only U.S. university to offer her the opportunity to attend CIES, improve her scores and be admitted to grad school.

Her previous English education in China focused on writing and grammar. Jianwei wants to improve her speaking and writing. At CIES, she is a Level 3. I assured Jianwei that her spoken grammar is good, she has clear pronunciation and no difficult accent. Her listening/comprehension appears good, as she quickly responded with precise details to each of my questions. She clearly related a fairly long and complicated story about her roommates.

Jianwei wants to attend grad school in the U.S. to study digital media communication. She graduated from college and worked one year for an advertising company in China, where she became interested in advertising on the Internet.

We talked about Internet access and digital media in China, which Jianwei explained has improved some since I visited China in 2007. She told me that most people subscribe to a service to access the Internet, but that older people (such as her parents in their 40s) use smartphones. They don't use desktop or laptop computers.

Jianwei agreed to bring her writing samples to our next session, as she said she wants to work on writing.

Our textbook author wrote: Speaking practice should be an opportunity for English Language Learners (ELLs) to "share what they really think, feel or believe" (Snow, p. 7). In TP#1, I asked mostly open-ended questions -- mostly why questions, encouraging Jianwei to give her opinions. I listened and probed for more details.

Doing more listening than speaking was a good strategy for TP#1 because Jianwei got plenty of practice speaking and I was able to assess her EFL needs.