Anna TP #5

Anna Prorok

September 18, 2014

TEFL Tutor Session No. 4

I had another lovely tutoring session with Rina at her home. On Thursday, we read three books together and took the time to go over one of them extensively, answering discussion/reading comprehension questions and looking at vocabulary of what certain words meant. We also practiced the pronunciation of words that she was struggling with as she read. Even though she did sound like she was having some trouble with the words, she understood what the gist of each story was about. 

I then gave her a few worksheets to do that I printed off of a EFL resource website. The worksheets practiced her reading comprehension. I chose to use 2nd grade level work even though she is in 1st grade. When I told her about this, she was ecstatic that she was doing higher level schoolwork and was motivated to do even more work together. I took note of this intrinsic motivator and will continue to challenge her with schoolwork since she seems to respond well to it. She struggled a little with the exact process of looking at a passage and then deciphering the answers that are explicitly in the text, then transferring them to answers that the comprehension questions ask. We read over the questions before reading the passage as a pre-reading activity. She also looked at the pictures on the sheet and correctly guessed that she would be reading about penguins. The passages were very short, three short paragraphs with three sentences maximum per paragraph. The questions were basic recall questions as well - nothing too advanced or difficult. She caught on quickly to underlining the answers in the text and figuring out the answers. She seemed to approach the activity like a game, similar to a scavenger hunt. 

After two reading comprehension worksheets I worked on some sentence construction with her as well as conjunction use. She got the hang of that quickly as well. Finally, I wrote out some sentences from her favorite frozen song and we filled in conjunctions where the blanks were. She repeated the song out loud from memory, filled in the blanks, and then we reviewed together why those words were appropriate for use. 

Altogether, it was a lovely time. Her mother brought me a snack - Korean chocolate mini cookies and Mountain Dew and asked about Rina's progress. She also said that Rina struggles with making complex sentences (i.e., using the word fun to make a sentence Rina wrote for her sentence, "It is fun."). Our next tutoring sentence will focus on those sort of activities where I show her how using her vocabulary can enhance her writing skills.