Evan-TS#3 (Bruce)

     Bruce and I met again not two days after our first meeting. It was this week where our reading lesson plan was due. I had selected an article from NPR that was transcribed. It was a dialog that could be read for lower level students, but the site included the recording as well. Knowing that Bruce wanted to practice his listening, I shifted my plans slightly and simply recycled the material and questions but for a listening exercise. The process went well, surprisingly. The questions were fitting and the dialog was not too quick for the listener. Additionally, the transcript was right in front of my face, making it really easy to point to facts in the dialog. I think I got lucky this time, but truly I had no way of knowing how appropriate this was for my student. he seemed to understand the material, but there is no way to know how many of those questions he would have got had I not helped him through them. What should have been a red flag for myself, is that he could not name the two main actors in the story after only having done the listening. We worked through it however, though undoubtedly I could (and should) have put more thought into the level of the material I was giving my student.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evan - TS#16

 For our final session Bruce and I met one of my favorite aspects of writing, passive voice. When I call it my favorite, I mean I hate it and want it expunged. This was another such session where explaining the theory behind the language was quite difficult. I managed to describe the difference in terms of actual action, like a ball being picked up. Who acts? Me or  the ball? That is active voice, passive voice is when the object of action is  the subject of a sentence. See? This sucks, describing passive voice. It's less impactful, but it is also used in certain aspects of informal speech, emphasis or certain use cases. We worked through the theory first, and this is where our more rigorous review of syntax helped quite a bit. When I told Bruce that the object of action becomes the subject, he seemed to understand, and he intuited the difference in the sentence structure, while still understanding they meant the same things. Furthermore, he picked up the examples without...
Read more

Evan CO#2 (Reading 2)

 This Class observation was a goo demonstration of a very strong lesson plan and awareness of the materials. I think also what helps is the intricate knowledge the teacher (Dr. Rios) had of the students' capability. He began the lesson with some review of vocab from the previous class and a schema building  activity that was done prior to this class. I cannot be sure, but he seems like he spent almost as much time working up to the article as the article itself. He was very able to hone in on what exactly the students were unaware of and needed help in. Additionally the class structure did a good job in engaging students ins as many aspects of language as possible. Instead of having the students read to themselves, he made them take turns speaking aloud. This helped the students work on speaking in addition to their readin skills. One thing I think about then, is comprehension. However, this was quickly assuaged when he spent a majority of the time working on composition and g...
Read more

Evan TS#15

 Bruce and I reviewed conjunctions in this session. However, it was more than just simple coordinating conjunctions. Bruce often comes to me with very ambitious ideas for a session. I think for tutoring to be more effective, I need to take a more active role in knowing what the tutee needs to know. This means that sometimes I need to tell the tutee what they are not doing well, as opposed to the other way around. This session Bruce came to me with a list of conjunctions and asked for help in learning the use case for each one. This was a monumental task for one session, and I was not sure where to begin. We began with some simple sentences, where I gave him both and asked for a conjunction that could make sense. He seemed to take rather well to this. What caused some confusion was "even though". The placement of the phrase has a large bearing on the meaning of the sentence. Effectively, you always want it before the clause you are taking into account. "Even though it was...
Read more