Harrison TP#7

Last Wednesday, September 24, I again met with my CIES tutees Seforah and Koo. Hoda emailed me before our meeting to say that she wasn't going to be able to make it. When we started the session, I thought I had let my tutees down because I forgot to bring snacks and drinks like last time, but to my surprise Koo brought donuts and orange juice. I had briefly seen her in the lobby right before we were supposed to meet and all she said was that she had to go do something and would be a few minutes late. I had no idea she was going to get donuts!

Once we actually got settled into the classroom with our donuts (I had a key lime pie one...so good), Seforah said she had some grammar questions from her TOEFL preparation workbook. She proceeded to pull a humungous, terrifyingly large tome from her bag. That really made me realize what a big deal this test is to a lot of these students. Anyway, Seforah showed me several multiple choice questions from the book which she had incorrectly answered (based on the answer key). It was sometimes difficult to explain exactly why the correct answers were correct. I found myself saying "this is correct because that's how it is/it sounds right" a couple of times. However, with the help of Google I was able to clarify probably 80 percent of them.

Next I helped edit a speech for a presentation that Koo had coming up. Again, it was sometimes difficult to explicitly explain why I was correcting something to her, but our handy writing correction symbol sheet proved helpful for this.

I found out this session that the version of the TOEFL that Seforah is taking doesn't include the speaking portion of the test, which I think is great for her because those TOEFL speaking examples we reviewed in class look HARD. Like I don't even think I could respond to them quickly and coherently enough. Hopefully she will be able to pass this less daunting version of the test.

Harrison