Taylor TP #6

Taylor Simpson

TP #6

9/17/2014

Goldstein Library

Last Wednesday I met with Gabriela and Ademir again, Marissa observed our session. This time they were preparing for their exams. Gabriela had a speaking exam and she brought a list of words she was having trouble pronouncing. Words like “live” and “leave” were difficult for her to distinguish the difference because of the way the letter “i” is pronounced in Portugese. She also had trouble with the suffix “ed”. She kept wanting to pronounce the e and the d separately, so it took a few tries for her to realize that it is one sound. She didn’t know what the topic would be for her exam so we mostly focused on pronunciation.

 Ademir had a writing assignment he was working on. He had written the first draft of a short auto biography. His writing abilities are a little below his speaking abilities so he asked me to mark the grammar errors. There weren’t many technical errors, but his writing is awkward. His sentence structure, although usually correct, is not very natural. I tried to explain how a native speaker would write it, at first he seemed to have a little trouble understanding the difference, but after going over it a few times I think he understood.

For the last few minutes of the session we talked about the big football game that was coming up (Clemson). They went to the first home football game of the season and said it was fun, but they didn’t understand how the game works. Their biggest question was how many people were on the team, they were confused at why there were so many guys sitting on the side lines. I am not very knowledgeable about football, but Marissa did a great job of explaining the basics and the important team rivalries compared to Brazilian soccer. We also discussed the whole incident with Jameis incident that happened last week and how it might affect the outcome of the game. They were very interested and curious about the idea of tailgating so I promised to invite them to a tailgate on Saturday.