FSU TEFL 120 Fall 1 2021

This class was broken into two portions, first what Dr Rios called the "rapid fire" and afterwards they discussed the pros and cons of different situations. The class was a relatively high level, so most of the students were more than capable of expressing themselves. The topics as well were very complex, and required a good amount of vocabulary to adequately do so. Each of the students were called on in turn in order to make it so each had a chance to express themselves. I think Dr Rios would have liked more interaction between students but each seemed very like minded, so they tended to agree with each other. I liked this activity a lot and thought it offered a good way to practice speaking while also working on practical skills. Working on the fly in order to create meaning is difficult in a second language, so to see these students formulate their ideas so strongly was telling. The only time I recall there being a correction, was when one student misplaced an "am...

 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...

 Jihye and I met again after a brief hiatus. I have a class immediately before our meeting, and if not for that our meeting would be my only obligation on campus, on a Friday. Class was canceled, I think you can do the math. After this break however, we met again as usual, though this time, slightly different. Typically she is rather quiet, but very attentive. This time, she had a question for me, what the States think of (in her case) South Koreans. This was a tough question, she was explicitly asking after stereotypes, which I try to avoid in principle. For another, the history of South Korea is young, incredibly young. Korean history itself goes back into ancient antiquities,  but the modern state known as South Korea only really came into existence as a result of Russia/U.S proxy wars. They have yet to truly be international actors as well. I commented on their lack of wars with America as well, typically our propaganda is a source of these pervasive stereotypes. I truly c...

 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...

 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...

  Date/Time: November 10, 2021 at 7:00am Location: Zoom Topic/Skill: Daylight Savings/Review Feedback provided to tutee: Today I reviewed the past material with her as well as taught her watch Daylight Savings is. At first it was hard for her to understand but after I went back and reviewed it more thoroughly, she understood. She also seemed to remember 90% of the vocabulary that we had covered and was able to make sentences about the vocabulary.  Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: I learned that she retained a lot of the information that I had taught her and that I was thorough when I explained it all to her. However, I learned that for more complex subjects like Daylight Savings, it best to go slow and check in every step of the way whether or not the student understands. Once I did that, I was able to figure out where she got confused and work on that before moving on.

Date/Time: November 3, 2021 at 8:00am Location: Zoom Topic/Skill: Reading Feedback provided to tutee: We finished the second Magic Treehouse book this lesson. Je-ah learned all of the vocabulary words and can understand them in context.  Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: I learned that I enjoy helping students with reading a lot. It is rewarding to see how far they can get after just a few sessions. For the last session with Je-ah, I am going to go through all the past vocabulary words with her and do a full review of everything she has learned since starting her sessions with me. 

 For my third classroom observation, I joined Ryan Flemming's beginner/intermediate listening class. This class was unique in that it contained mixed skill levels. Based on what he told me, I don't think this is typical for a CIES classroom, but was unavoidable this semester because of enrollment/COVID-related issues. Since this was a listening class, Ryan did most of the talking. More than any of the other classroom observations, the manner in which the instructor's speech was modified for the students' sake was most apparent here. Given the level of the students, this was totally appropriate and to be expected. I think it takes a lot more skill/practice than one might think to speak in a way that is comprehensible to beginner and lower intermediate students of English, but I think Ryan did a terrific job, and I sought to emulate him specifically when I was giving my own lessons (both the "fake" one during our class meeting, and the real one where we taught i...

 For my second classroom observation, I joined Dr. Rios' intermediate speaking class. The activity for the day involved the students getting together in pairs to discuss an assignment that they had done before class, or in a previous class. This took up much of the class time, but there was also a significant portion of the class during which Dr. Rios simply interacted with the class. It was a rather small class, so it was possible to involve all of the students in this discussion. This was the part that was most helpful for me. In interacting with the class, Dr. Rios asked them about their weeks/weekends, told various jokes, and was just all-around very lively, interactive, friendly, and even critical but in an entirely non-abrasive way (e.g. correcting mistakes by way of repetition with the correct terms). His manner of speech was noticeably slower and more carefully pronounced than what would be appropriate for advanced students or native speakers. I also noticed that his vocabu...

 For my first classroom observation, I joined Olivia James's advanced listening class. The two topics that she spent the most time on in class were the local weather and a board-game similar to chess, called Go. Unlike chess, Go was created, and has been traditionally played, in the East rather than the West. I paid close attention to the way that Olivia spoke: her volume, speed, vocabulary, and so on. Since this was an advanced class, I didn't notice too much in her manner of speaking that would have felt out of place for a native speaker. I did notice, however, that she used physical gestures quite often, especially when she had the weather radar pulled up via the projector. Many of the terms she used when talking about the weather could potentially have been challenging for the students: e.g. doppler, precipitation, and so on. However, this fit nicely with the idea that students' listening practice should contain around 75% known vocabulary. When it came to the discussio...

Date/Time: Thursday, October 21, 2021, 8:30PM Location: via Facetime Topic discussed: Religion, Favorite Movies, and Cooking Cultural and/or Linguistic topics you and your partner learned: Mehmet and I discussed our favorite movies in American culture, and Mehmet shared some of his favorite Turkish movies. We discussed Sci-Fi movies, such as the Lake House and Annihilation. We also talked about our favorite comedy movies and comedians, such as Jim Carrey. Mehmet told me about his favorite Turkish comedy movie, which is called G. O. R. A. He also told me about a group of famous Turkish horror movies, which are based on stories from the Quran.

Date/Time: Saturday, October 1, 2021, 11:00AM Location: via Zoom Topic discussed: School and Cultural Incident Cultural and/or Linguistic topics you and your partner learned: For this session, I asked Fahad about a time when he experienced a cultural incident. He told me that a teacher once “shushed” him by putting a finger to her lips and saying “shhh,” which is very offensive in Kuwaiti and Arabic culture. He did not realize that that gesture was more normalized and common in America, which led him to be extremely offended and talk back to the teacher.  

Date/Time: Wednesday September 23 at 6:30PM Location: via Zoom Topic discussed: Cooking and adjusting to life in America Cultural and/or Linguistic topics you and your partner learned: During this session, Mehmet told me about trying to find a job in Tallahassee, which is extremely difficult due to his citizenship status. He also told me that it was very difficult to take his driver’s test and he did not know how to find a car which he had to provide one for the driver’s test. He also told me about some of the reasons he chose to move to America. Because he wants to be a chef, America is a place where he can try and learn about a lot of different types of food.

Date/Time: Saturday, September 11, 2021, 11:00AM Location: via Zoom Topic discussed: Birthdays in our cultures Cultural and/or Linguistic topics you and your partner learned: On this day, I had driven to Atlanta for one of my friends who was having a big birthday party. Fahad told me that he was shocked by how big Americans go with their birthday parties. He said that in Kuwait, they do not do anything to celebrate birthdays. When he first came to America, he was taken aback by the money and effort some people put into their birthday parties. I did not know that Kuwaitis did not celebrate birthdays like Americans do!

Jihye and I had another nice conversation today. I asked her about the "critical incident" and we had some trouble here. She was not sure what I meant, like she understood cultural boundaries, but I don't think she understood how important the "critical" was. She gave me some small examples, like bowing heads, which I could understand, but I did not consider critical. She said she did not have many troubles, and was overly aware of how she was acting in America. To get her to better understand, I used Mrs Kim's example of the water in the restaurant. She seemed to understand more, but was still unsure if anything like that had happened. I told her it would seem like she would not be doing anything wrong. She told me a story about how she was caught brushing her teeth in a public bathroom, how some of her peers found it strange. I think that qualified perfectly, because no one here does that, how we think its strange. There are people who brush three times a ...

         Bruce had recently taken a quiz and was confused about what a "gerund" was. He was required to form sentences using a few select verbs in combination with a gerund. This was helpful as it made me realize how impactful gerunds are, and how strange they are. I think Bruce is still struggling with the concept of nouns, so a gerund really threw him through a loop. He understood however, that a gerund refers to the whole activity. I used my favorite example sentence, "do you mind my asking?". This works well because people understand the activity of asking a question. In addition, it works because people identify with being imposing. One thing he did have trouble with was realizing that a gerund is not just simply a verb with -ing on the end. The aforementioned noun confusion did not help, I don't think. We went over a few examples, and he seemed to understand better at that point. I then asked that he complete the activity from his quiz. His first sent...

           Today, we tackled clauses again. However, it was more because we were focused on the nitty gritty of the sentence. This happened by accident. We were working on adjective clauses again, he was asked to omit the relative pronoun if he could. He was struggling with knowing when he should. The difference being if the clause describes the subject or the object. If you omit the relative pronoun from the clause describing the subject, there is a mix up with the verbs in the clauses. I had to break down an individual clause and describe the idea of "complete thought" to Bruce, though that proved rather easy. We went into detail about what a subject is, and he came to the intersection of nouns and subjects. This proved more confusion as it was difficult for him to grasp that a subject must be a noun, but not all nouns are subjects. It was hard to describe his mistake to him because of how logic and language intersect. I used the sentence, "a square...

    I arrived again to working with Bruce and tenses. This time we tackled example sentences from his class. They (the students) were asked to to describe a film they had seen previously, requiring the past tense. Some sentences were easy fixes such as replacing "is" with "are". One sentence, "Mr. Bean saw a child jump on the slide" more complicated. For one, the teacher corrected the student, and replaced "jump" with "jumping". I was not sure which was correct, because the latter could have been more formal. I just did not know. It also could denote different actions, or a different temporal meaning. I just had no clue. Either way we worked with the teacher's example. Anything beyond the simple variants of the tenses caused some confusion, both in explanation and his understanding. We ended the lesson by trying to make some example sentences. I made a sentence and he gave me the tense. In hindsight, this should have been reversed, ...

  This meeting with Bruce, we covered tenses in more rigorous detail. Again this falls under my inability to recognize my tutee's weaker areas. He was unsure what he was tasked with so we dove into covering them from the beginning with the simple tenses. He understood these quite clearly, but struggled to know which one to use on the fly. He was able to recognize the forms, but struggled at using them. I think I should work less on the theoretical side with Bruce, and focus more on him actually using the tenses. I should ask him to write sentences in a given tense, rather than explain where to use them. One other difficulty, is one cannot often assume what exactly a speaker is trying to convey, and tenses inform a lot in a sentence. I don't know which tense he wants to use, right? I can't read his mind and know the ideas he is trying to convey until he actually conveys them. Bit of a conundrum. Either way, working more closely with productive activities would likely help si...

      This class observation took place a few weeks ago, and I forgot to write about it then so I'm really foggy on the details. The class that I observed was Sana McHarek's reading class for group 4. I do know that she started the class off with a schema building exercise. After that, the students got into groups to work on an activity after which they discussed it as a class. Also present were two other observers, not from our group, but from FSU. I really can't remember much more than that.

      For this final session, we met on zoom again. The connectivity issues were worse this time, but we were still able to make it work. I prepared a small lesson on words in English, especially American English, that can vary in their pronunciation from person to person, rather than dialect to dialect. Some of the words I included were route, either, pecan, and often. After this brief discussion, we reviewed a quiz Masoud had taken in class. It was a vocab quiz and the first part was simply a match the word to the definition type which he had no trouble with. The trouble came with the second section in which there were sentences with blanks to fill in. For a few of these sentences, the words had to be changed from a noun to a verb or a noun to an adjective, etc. Although his answers were 50/50 on this section, when I explained to him what was wrong with the incorrect ones he would immediately finish my sentence with the correct answer. It seems to me that instead of fai...

         Something that I've noticed, especially during the last few sessions, is Masoud's tendency to say things like "before 3 weeks", "before 2 years", etc. instead of the correct "3 weeks ago", "2 years ago," so I decided that for this lesson, I would elaborate on the differences between before and ago. For this session, we had to meet on zoom, and there were some connectivity issues, so I'm not entirely sure how well I got through to him. "Before" can function as an adverb, a preposition, and a conjunction whereas "ago" can only function as an adverb, so I focused on before's use as an adverb. The main difference between them, when used as an adverb, is that "before" talks about a period of time between two distinct events but "ago" signifies the time between now and a past event. "Ago" can only be used to talk about the past, whereas "before" can be used in the past...

  Masoud and I met at the Starbucks near where he lived. For this session, I went over the ways in which native (North American) speakers can pronounce the letters "t" and "d", as they're not always pronounced with their standard pronunciation. The purpose of this wasn't so much that he could emulate these pronunciations, but understand them when he heard native speakers talking. We've talked before about how North American English speakers tend to pronounce the "t" more like a "ch" in front of "r" (i.e. "tree" frequently sounds more like "chree"), so I reviewed this pronunciation change first. I then pointed out how the "t" sound also tends to be reduced or even silent in certain situations, such as after an "n" or at the end of words (e.g. in the words "can't", "winter", and "internet"). Throughout the lesson, I emphasized that this is how native spe...

      We met on zoom again for this meeting. It was kind of funny at first because it was 10 am Eastern time and I was tired so I told him good morning, forgetting it was nighttime for him. We got right into talking about movies, after we talked about how our weekends went and I mentioned that I saw 2 movies. I found out that we both enjoy scary movies, although he prefers the more subtler, less gory variety whereas I like the 80's-type slasher and monster movies as well. I mentioned a couple of Korean horror movies and asked if he had seen them, but he hadn't. Some other movies we talked about were Us, Get Out, Alien, and Parasite. I brought up Squid Game, which he hasn't seen yet, so I told him he really should watch it. We had a pretty funny talk about The Interview, or rather, I told him about it, since he (surprisingly) hadn't heard about it and how it caused an international incident between North Korea and the U.S. We also talked a lot about the state of movie th...

 We met October 25 at 1:30pm via Zoom. We discussed my plans for my birthday weekend as well as each others plans for Halloween. She said that she is nervous to go out to bars in Tallahassee because she is not from the United States and does not want to feel uncomfortable. So, I told her that if she wants to go somewhere and feel comfortable, then she should go to The Brass Tap in Midtown. It is outside and you can sit at a table and have a waiter so there is no need to feel uncomfortable going up to a bar and yelling your drink order at a busy bartender. I told her that although I am out of town for a couple weeks, I would love to meet her in person at this bar and meet her husband. I plan to reach out to her after returning to Tallahassee.

 We met October 20 at 1:30pm via Zoom. Hang Kim and I have become friends and enjoy talking to each other about our weekends as well as discussing our personal lives. She is particularly interested in talking about each other's relationships and how they differ from the norm/Korean culture. I really enjoy talking to her and updating her on my life as well as hearing about her life. I plan on inviting her to hang out in person at the end of our Conversation Partner meetings.

Date/Time: November 1, 2021 at 8:00am Location: Zoom Topic/Skill: Reading Feedback provided to tutee: I am working with Je-ah on reading the second Magic Tree House book. She made a noticeable increase in fluency this session. On a full page, there was only one word that needed correcting. She leared words such as: fire, torch, knight, moat, and precipice.  Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: Je-ah is not very interested in this second book but she likes to read so I think she likes the activity. To me, it seems that though she does not like the subject she is still interested in becoming better reader.