Sushila TP #2

TP #: 2 

Date/Time: September 3, 2014 3pm-4pm

Location: CIES building Rm# 311

Topic/Skill: Simple past tense verbs, affirmatives and negatives

Today I meet with Hojeong, she is a young lady that will be studying music. Her main focus of study will be in voice, specifically opera. She brought some of her homework with her, which was nice because it gave me a more specific idea of what to work on. In the beginning of the session she had a hard time understanding affirmative and negative verb clauses. Within a short period of time she mastered the affirmative verb phrases. The negative verb phrases took a little bit more time for her to grasp but by the end of our session she breezed through them.  There was one speed bump in our tutoring session and that was trying to explain the English phrase of “athletic ability”. After trying many different strategies to explain it I pulled up google translate and she understood instantly. While we went through her homework I made a list of imperfect past tense verbs for her to study. This tutoring session was very fulfilling for me because I was able to feel her excitement once she understood certain words and grammar topics.

I noticed that she is very swift when she is reading English but when she is communicating with me she is not able to express her words as fast or clear. I know that this is normal, but I would like to bridge that gap some more in our upcoming sessions.  For future sessions, I will give her a topic at the end of each session for her to write about, as homework. In the following session I will hold a conversation with her about that topic for about 5 minutes. I feel that by familiarizing herself with the topic beforehand she will have more confidence and be able to communicate with me more fluidly.