Sushila TP#1

TP #: 1

Date/Time: September 1, 2014 3pm-4pm

Location: Atomic coffee off Tennessee St.

Topic/Skill: Assessment and pronunciation

On Monday I tutored Roberta and Melissa, who were from Brazil. Melissa was 21 years old and Roberta was 20. Both girls seemed a little shy at first; however, as the session went on they opened up more.  After I assessed what levels they were at the girls told me that their main goals out of tutoring was to improve on their speaking abilities. We proceed to go over the pronunciation of the English Alphabet. Both of them had difficulties with the pronunciation of “R” and “Js”. Afterwards I would spell out long words like Mississippi and other words containing the letters R and J. They had some difficultly with this but showed improvement as we did more of them.  I will most like will re-visit  this tactic each tutoring session for about 5-10 minutes so they gain better listening skills. After talking to the girls I could see that both of them are very bright. They both plan to study Engineering at Florida State, once they pass the TOFL (which I do not think they will have any trouble with.)

Roberta and Melissa seem extremely eager to learn English and see more of American culture. Since they have been to Tallahassee they have not seen much of it since they do not have a car or are familiar with the city. That is why next Monday I am going to take them to Lynchgate park and hold our tutoring sessions there. I will have them describe their surroundings and what the like/ do not like about it; in addition to, other planned conversational topics. I also will play some American songs that are easily understood and have them write out the lyrics to them. I hope by them being in a more causal setting they are not familiar with will help them better acquire the English language.

Logan_CO#3

J Logan Matthews
CO#3
Sep 2, 2014 (2:00am-2:50am)
Hecht House, RM 313
Felicia's Foundations Listening

At the beginning of the day's final lesson, I was once again introduced as a guest with elaboration and elicitation of meaning. Some of the students had remembered my name from the grammar session that morning so It was nice to know they remember more than I do on a regular basis. Felicia then segued into the next activity which was a warm up "Bell Ringer" of two sentences students use to describe the everyday activities. This part proceeded in much the same way as the speaking class with the instructor providing the linguistic support up to the level of listening for the words individually to write them on the whiteboard.

I noticed a difference in Felicia's speaking style though with this being a listening class. It appeared that she spoke in longer and more complex sentences but she enunciated with pauses in a similar fashion to how I had spoken to my adult tutees for them to better here. It was a subtle shift but I knew that she was actively challenging them to listen.

A pairwork worksheet activity was introduced based on listening to the names for members of a family tree whereby students would have to recall the names based on the relations to the boy in the tree. I would not have considered it before but the name "Rachel" does sound similar to "Angel," which appeared to confuse most of the students in their recall.

Activities that followed included listening to a chronological sequence of events twice and reporting back on the comprehension of the details as well as evaluating the listening ability for common prepositions by numbering them in a sequence of pictures of a ball and box.

The lesson was ended with Felicia correcting a students statement about his father as being fat by introducing the American mores of using euphemisms for terms like fat and skinny, finally relating them to the saying "Never ask a woman her age."

I was happy to see the sequence of classes for a particular ESL group at CIES for how it builds on established material. It reminded me of one of the golden rules for public speaking: "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them."

Logan_CO#2

J Logan Matthews
CO#2
Sep 2, 2014 (1:00am-1:50pm)
Hecht House, RM 313
Leslie's Foundations Speaking

My schedule still in disarray, I was present at the wrong time. That was because I had received a prior email to reschedule my observation for Thursday. However, the person who needed my slot had rescheduled as well so I was able to observe today's session without a problem. I quickly noticed that Leslie possessed a cheery inflection to her voice that seemed to prompt responses from the students more effectively than before. I could only ponder at how long it may have took to perfect the correct tone that the students enjoyed the most. Leslie quickly covered the prepositional review through elicitation and wrote some of the examples on the whiteboard.

Shortly thereafter they began two exercises for pairwork in which the students came up with ways to describe the placement of the objects in two instances of a classroom picture projected onto the whiteboard. With the picture superimposed on the whiteboard Leslie could denote the items where students had trouble in elicitation. I thought of how because of the small class size it is easy for the instructor to remember the names of the students. When this is not a ready convenience I suppose a ball or soft baton could suffice.

The final activity of the session was more pairwork where the students were informed to prepare some statements when asked about their partner. The instructor provided the necessary linguistic support with emphasis on the verb formats introduced from the grammar session, -s and -es.

Logan_CO#1

J Logan Matthews
CO#1
Sep 2, 2014 (9:00am-9:50am)
Hecht House, RM 313
Debbie's Grammar Foundations

My scheduling for today's observations was in a state of disarray from downloading a previous edit of the google doc. So it was with some unease and on four hours of sleep that I began my observation that morning. When Debbie entered she instructed me to relocate to a hotseat in the front of the class room because I was still trying to find the best vantage point from when I had entered the classroom earlier. I noticed several woman in hijabs or burkhas beginning to sit opposite to me at that table and figured that I would have to move at some point to avoid invoking the ire of Islamic mores which Debbie later defined as "conservative." After that misunderstanding was navigated, Debbie began the class by introducing myself and another observer, Angel, a resident teacher, as the guests. She briefly discussed the period as morning and that she would begin with "review," defined as again-see.

The lesson proper began with the usual prepositional phrases in relation to physical placement. Debbie expressed that she was proud of her students for remembering the prior lesson and provided definition of the expression. After the review the lesson proceeded into using the simple present form of English verbs as well as gendered pronouns for describing daily routines. Much of the lesson's content was able to be elicited from students with individuals comparing the differences between gendered activities. Specific emphasis was placed on when to use the -es versus the e form of the verbs to provide comprehensible pronunciation in situations like brushs->brushes.

This lesson introduced the basic structure of the question and answer format of talking about routine schedules which I would later find provided the framework for the successive series of lessons I attended that day for the foundations group. I later remarked that Debbie must be the "Atlas," who supports the group, since she cannot benefit from pairwork or established material to the extent that the speaking and listening sessions could.

Gale_CP#1

Gale Workman

CP#1

Aug. 29, 2014/2-3 p.m.

Vocational school

I talked with Paola Diaz, a student from Puerto Rico. She attends school Thursday through Saturday at the Aveda Institute in Tallahassee. She will graduate in November and return full-time to Lynn Haven, Florida, where she lives with her parents.

Only Spanish is spoken at Paola’s home. Her mother speaks only Spanish, and her father speaks Spanish and English. He learned English as an adult after the family moved to Florida to live near other family members.

Paola said her mother can speak a bit of English, but her mom lacks confidence in her skills and is reluctant to speak English. Mom’s affective filter is strong. When mom and Paola go out together, Mom relies on Paola to translate.

Paola grew up in Puerto Rico. She and her family spoke only Spanish at home, and Paola spoke Spanish at school. She said her school taught English beginning in the fourth grade, so she was exposed to English grammar, reading and speaking – a lot of recitation and repetition.

She said she taught herself a lot of English by watching to Disney movies. Paola’s family moved to Lynn Haven when she was about 13 years old. She said the school administered ESOL tests. She learned to speak English to survive high school.

She said, however, that she still struggles with writing. Spelling and grammar are challenging. During our conversation, she made a few “beautiful mistakes” with verb tenses. She said she struggles with vocabulary, but I noticed only one time during our conversation that she had word confusion.

Paola seeks to improve her English because she would like to write a novel. She said she loves to read novels – particularly young adult literature (I told her what the genre is called). We talked a lot about books and movies -- conversation was lively.

I learned from my conversation with Paola that English Language Learning is a life-long process. I was surprised to learn that although Paola sounds like she’s been speaking English for more than five years, she is still intrinsically motivated to improve her English-language skills.

Logan_TP#3

J Logan Matthews
TP#3
Sep 1, 2014 (5:30-6:30)
Tutee's Residence

My tutee for this evening was Claire, a 6 year old Korean-English bilingual girl in the first grade. Her mother had informed me that she had been living in the U.S. for three years and she was already one reading level ahead of the first grade. In my assessment she was a very well-behaved student and seemed to have an excellent attention span for her age.

Her mother, Jihei, began the session by showing me some errors on her school work and I elicited and provided correction for one of them as a demonstration. I later began the session by asking about her day, specifically her special trip to Wakullah Springs and whether she swam or waded (providing visual definition for this) and how many people she went with. After this, Claire appeared to be in anticipation to begin reading a selection of level 2 books she had picked out from the library. I let her proceed reading and whenever there was a long pause I provided support in sounding out the words. Some of the words needed explanation and I went in detail by drawing pictures in my sketchbook to relate them to simpler vocabulary. 

For the hour-long lesson we proceeded in a similar fashion, finishing one book and beginning another. Along the way I stopped to test her reading comprehension and provided definition. In the second book we spent a lot of time breaking down a heavily punctuated sentence similar to this "In the night, Waynashey baboons, like Tino, snuggle together." Claire had a hard time identifying  separation in subjects as well as the usage of like. I began by extending the phrases into independent clauses as I explained how it was used as shorthand for descriptions relating to questions like, "Which baboons?" and "When do they snuggle?" Still, she seemed to not comprehend the sentence entirely but we were making progress until our time was already up.

Over email, Jihei had given me a breakdown of how she would spend an hour on English with Claire and I think that my natural tendency to digress got the better of me and we ended up spending the whole time on reading punctuation, comprehension, and pronunciation. Next time, Claire's mother wants us to work on Claire's weaker areas in spelling and sentence construction, judging from the correction's on her 1st grade worksheet. I will prepare some small cards for writing sentence fragments on and play a word soup game for the sentences Claire appears to need help with. I also have some ideas for playing card games if she grows tired of that activity. Next time I need to suppress my desire to give a very thorough explanation of a phrase or situation during one on one and opt for simple relational definitions to save time. I will also set some alarms on my phone to match the lesson breakdown in the email. 

TP #1: Taylor

TP #1: Taylor

August 29, 2014

Location: PJ’s House

On Friday I tutored P.J. Kim, a 3^rd grade boy who lives in Tallahassee and was raised speaking both English and Korean. His mother told me that he is fluent in both languages, but his English grammar is behind other children his age. He has 3 English tutoring sessions a week and his teacher sends home worksheets for extra practice.

When I first started talking with PJ I discovered he can speak English well, but he speaks slowly and has to think carefully about each sentence.

We worked on some extra English homework that his teacher sent home. There was a short passage, about 200 words, which he was able to read easily. For the most part it seemed like he was able to understand the passage well. There were a few words that he didn’t really know the meaning of, but he was very good at using context to figure out the definition. Then we worked on vocabulary homework. The list of words was new to him, but he was able to figure out the meaning of a few of the words based on context. The rest of the words he was able understand and use in sentences after I explained their definition. For the last ten minutes of the session I had him read a comic book which was a little more difficult than the passage he read earlier. There were quite a few words that he had trouble sounding out, but I encouraged him to keep trying and he was able to get it. The pictures in the comic book were very helpful in figuring out the parts that he didn’t understand.

For our next session I think he needs materials at a slightly higher reading level and we will focus a little more on speaking.