Zack - TS1 (Zheping)

 My goal for my first tutoring session with Zheping was mainly to get to know one another, but also to assess his English skills in doing so. I began by asking him questions, mainly those listed on the needs assessment handout, but also some of my own as the flow of the conversation dictated. He also asked me some questions about myself, so we truly did get to know one another. Zheping's native language is Mandarin Chinese, but he's been studying English for 10 years or so. However, I gather that prior to coming to CIES, his English education was primarily of the grammar-focused, "academic" classroom sort that is common in many (usually Eastern) Asian countries. Zheping's goal in pursuing English skills at CIES is to enter a master's program in computer science at FSU.

As for assessment of Zheping's English:

He made very few grammatical mistakes in his speech, though we stuck largely to fairly familiar and easy topics. He did say, just once, "gooder", but self-corrected immediately to "better". Judging from his responses (not just head nods, which can be misleading) he seemed to understand everything I said as well, even when I suspected I might be using a difficult word. If there is any apparent weakness in his spoken English, it is his pronunciation, which was a bit difficult to understand at times. Since he did not seem to show signs of any particularly weak area apart from this, I thought it best to simply ask him what he would like to work on going forward. He didn't have a ready answer, besides to say that he will need to pass the TOEFL at some point, although I did discover that he only speaks English at CIES, and all Chinese when he's not there. Eventually, he did suggest that he might like to work on improving his pronunciation as well. I showed him, merely as a suggestion, the SRS program that I use to learn Japanese and the shadowing method I use to work on Japanese pronunciation. I'm not quite sure how to go about tutoring pronunciation, to be honest! I plan to look into some exercises before our next tutoring session. I also asked Zheping to think a bit more about his particular needs in the time until our next tutoring session, and to text me with any suggestions he has at least a day ahead of time. If he doesn't come up with anything, I may simply find some practice TOEFL writing material to have him work on, and see if I can glean anything about where he's weak from that.


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