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.