FSU TEFL 120 Spring 1 2022

  TS Blogs: #20 Date/Time: 03.07.2022 at 3:00 p.m. Location:  Zoom Topic/Skill: Listening and speaking comprehension, American culture on college campuses Feedback provided to tutee: In this lesson, the tutee and I worked on speaking and listening skills by discussing the different future options for the tutee. The tutee had many questions on what steps to take after his completion with CIES at the end of this term and I helped with the application process for TCC and FSU. This lesson served as a great wrap up lesson with the tutee and end on a pleasant note.  Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: This lesson taught me that often CIES students feel very confident in their English within CIES, however when they have to venture out into the English speaking world their confidence fades. ESL students have to quickly adapt to culture, slang, and accents, rather than simply proper English they learn in the classrooms. 

 For my last session with Muhannad, he asked me about the connecting word “while.” It was something I hadn’t explained to someone else before, so together we looked up a list of all connecting words and found a page from the Perdue Owl that covered all the different types of connecting words and where to use them. Since the website was written for native speakers, this session was a little longer as I taught myself the information and then helped Muhannad break it down and pick out patterns he could use to determine when to use each one. We ended out session with a conversation about our plans after these tutoring sessions, from what the rest of our classes looked like to what we hoped to do after finishing our studies. Throughout all our tutoring session, we always had such interesting conversations about studying and language, among several other things, and I greatly enjoyed working with him. 

 For my last session with Je-ah, I wanted to make it fun, so I found a few different word games we could play that used familiar vocabulary. The games helped in every session to build her confidence in speaking, and although I overlooked it for our time together, looking back I noticed she gave me more feedback on days where I drew her focus and got her talking with activities like the quizlet matching game. 

 I showed up at CIES for the tutoring session with Muhannad today and the EFL students and teachers were having a party for the end of the session. We decided to join the party for our session today, as they were playing Taboo, which is a great way to practice speaking, listening, and vocabulary. After the games were finished, I made sure to have a conversation with Muhannad, and I explained the meaning behind the word taboo and why it is used as the name of the game. We chatted more about school and learning a second language, focusing on study strategies and the difference between studying at CIES and my experience learning French for my school’s foreign language requirement. 

 Continuing from our last session, Je-ah and I talked about foods again. We practiced with the quizlet activities, but focused more on talking, with me asking her questions about her preferences and such throughout our activities. I also focused on her use of the present tense, correcting it where I could, although having our sessions over Zoom sometimes made it difficult to hear and understand each other. 

 The list of vocabulary that I had used in the previous session with Je-ah had some typos and missing pictures, since it was one made by someone else. After finding those mistakes in the last session and seeing how they impacted the activities, I went through and corrected them for us to practice with this session. The list contains a lot of foods, as well as distinctions between singular and plural, so I covered the basic rules for talking about plural nouns and we had a conversation about our favorite foods. 

 The focus of this session with Muhannad was the past continuous tense. I went back to my timeline of verb tenses, since he expressed that the visual helped him better understand when to use the different tenses. He already understood how to form the past continuous but was confused about when he should use it. Along with explaining it, I found an online quiz that provided practice choosing between the simple past and the past continuous, and we went over the quiz together. 

 Meeting with Je-ah again, we once again reviewed the vocabulary on quizlet. We went back to previous lists and completed some of the harder fill-in-the-blank activities, and throughout I asked her questions to help encourage use of the vocabulary outside of the practice excercises. While most of the focus was on review, we came back to the newest list for a few short exercises at the end of the session. 

 After attempting the backpack grammar lesson last session, I decided to focus this session on object vocabulary. We talked for a bit about different objects and recalled the last session, and then I pulled up another quizlet. As I’ve been using these, I have notice that Je-ah enjoys doing the matching activity the most. The exercise is click and drag, but since it is on my computer and I’m screen sharing, I had Je-ah read out a word and then tell me the directions to drag it to the proper picture. This not only gave practice for the vocabulary words, but also words such as “left, right, up, down, near and far.”

 Muhannad had questions about using the past tense, so today we focused on the simple past. I added it to my timeline of verb tenses and we looked for patterns on when to use it. We also looked at irregular verbs, and worked together to pick out and memorize some of the common verbs and their forms. Working on this topic with him helped me realize how difficult it is to explain the grammatical structures that I use without thinking, and we had an interesting conversation about that at the end of the session. 

 As a way to practice my teaching methods, I used this session with Je-ah to present one of my lesson plans that I wrote for class that applied to low level students. The grammar lesson focused on possessives, and I went through explaining each one, and then we did the backpack activity together. It was still a little rough since I forgot to do some of the vocabulary building for everyday objects. 

 I took this session with Je-ah to review the topics we had covered so far. We started with the test function on quizlet for the two lists we had used. The pictures for each word showed up, and the questions included multiple choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank. Since I had the quizlet up on my computer, I shared my screen and we worked through the tests together, with Je-ah providing the answers on her own while I typed and clicked. I had to help her with a few words that she was stuck on because they had showed up less frequently in our practice. I also gave example sentences for the words to connect them to practical conversation. 

 Muhannad asked for help with the different present tenses, so we spent this meeting going over the difference between the simple present and the present continuous tenses. I used my notes from our TEFL class about the verb tenses to help explain, along with example sentences, and together Muhannad and I worked out some patterns to follow. I also drew out a timeline to help visualize the “when” that each tense refers to. 

 Meeting with Je-ah again, we reviewed telling time once again and practiced more with the quizlet. After practicing time for a bit, I brought back our activities that we had studied previously and the two of us worked together to come up with a schedule for how to spend a Saturday. 

 Je-ah and I once again talked about what we did over the weekend, and I also asked her about the time in Korea, and explained that while it was night for her, it was early in the morning for me. This led into my lesson about telling time in English. The lesson progressed smoothly since she was already familiar with lower numbers. Going above 20 was pushing it, so we focused on telling time by the hour for today, as well as phrases like “in the evening” or “7 o’clock.” I accompanied this with a quizlet activity covering common vocab and matching the analog clocks to their times. 

 Muhannad brought me an essay he wrote for his writing class, and I helped him go through and find the grammar mistakes. We read through each sentence together, and after hearing them out loud, most of the time he was able to say that there was something wrong with the sentence, but he couldn’t always pick out exactly what. After going through a few sentences, he started to recognize recurring mistakes, and we discussed why he thought they were wrong and how to write them correctly. As we worked, the focus shifted from the essay to explaining some basic rules about the past tense, both simple and continuous. 

 I met with Je-ah again, and we started with a conversation about what we did that weekend. It provided practice using the vocabulary we studied the previous session, as well as testing to see what she remembered. Using the quizlet, we reviewed the few terms we had practiced last session and learned a few more on the list. I worked with her on some example sentences before returning to the quizlet games to further study the vocabulary. 

 I met with Je-ah again, and I prepared a lesson on common activities and hobbies. After explaining the topic, we went over some common activities that people will do in their free-time, and I used a quizlet to help practice vocabulary. Quizlet allows people to make flash cards and study lists on their website, and they have several interactive study activities to help learn and practice vocabulary. With Je-ah, I shared my screen and we went through the list together, which contained the words and picture to represent them, and then we completed a matching activity. 

 While meeting with Muhannad for the first time, I focused on going over some of the needs assessment questions provided before we started tutoring. He is in group 2 for speaking, and asked me about study strategies for improving his English. We discussed the prepositions in, at, and on, trying to figure out a pattern for when to use each one, and I found an online quiz for us to use during the session and for practice outside of the classroom. 

 For my second meeting with Je-ah, we reviewed some basic phrases for conversation, like greetings and farewells. Again, the focus was mainly on holding a conversation, but I realized after this session that she was already familiar with how these phrases and was not overly engaged. I was faced with the challenge of finding a way to cover materials in a way that would be engaging for a 12 year old student. There was also some awkwardness because it was just the two of us and she could not answer my question about whether she understood what we went over. 

 For my first meeting with Je-ah, I focused on trying to have a basic conversation with her. Her mom requested that we focus on conversation skills, so I wanted to gauge her abilities. She has a good understanding of basic conversation, and we were able to talk about our age, hobbies and favorite colors and food. I also reviewed numbers with her. It was challenging as she has a lower level of listening comprehension and speaking skills than my other tutees, and we were working on Zoom. 

 In the group 2 speaking class, the students completed an activity in which they wrote information about a city on a worksheet, and rest of the class had to guess what city they chose based on information like size, climate, types of jobs, and geographical layout. In the previous class, the instructor modeled the activity, and they reviewed his example in class and went over vocabulary before filling it out themselves. At the end of class, they shared the information with the class and we tried to guess their city. 

  TS Blogs: #19 Date/Time: 02.28.2022 at 3:00 p.m. Location: Zoom   Topic/Skill: Listening and speaking comprehension Feedback provided to tutee: In this lesson, the tutee practiced a presentation he was giving at CIES and I provided feedback on specific parts. More importantly, it allowed him to practice in a comforting environment and feel more confident. Additionally, we discussed various topics which allowed me to provide new vocabulary, listening practices, and speech practice.  Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: In this lesson I learned how great the impact of just providing a space for someone learning a language to speak comfortably can be. The tutee expressed they felt much more confident talking to native speakers after working together this session because they only had little experience beforehand in this type of setting. This demonstrated to me how important it is to be patient with those learning a language, regardless of the setting...

 Dr. Kennel led the group 3 reading class, and he kept the focus mainly on vocabulary and strategies for learning new words. He reviewed the SQ3R strategy with the students: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. The steps help the students acquire the word through thorough understanding and practice. For the question step, he gave them 3 questions to ask themselves when encountering and learning to use a new word: 1. What is it called in English? 2. What am I doing (in English)? 3. What are they doing (in English)? After reviewing vocabulary strategies, they moved on to pre-reading for the article, with Dr. Kennel explaining why pre-reading is important. The pre-reading was a discussion about free university education and whether the students believe that university should be free or not. 

 The group 3 composition class worked on preparations for taking the TOEFL integrated writing exam. In the previous class, they listened to the audio lecture and took notes on in, and in this class they read a related article, practicing taking notes on the reading and comparing the two sources.  It was interesting that their focus was less on comprehension and more on reading and writing strategies, since most of the students were already proficient in reading and writing.