FSU TEFL Certificate Course Spring 2019

On Wednesday, January 30 th at 3:00, Ngoc and I had our weekly conversation partner meeting.   We went to Chick-Fil-A and had a late lunch and then we went to Yogurt Kingdom on Tennessee St.   We talked about places she likes to go to in Tallahassee and she told me that she wanted to try a few different food places.   We agreed to go to the BBQ place next to the Copeland Starbucks then next time we meet since both of us have never been there before.   While we were at Yogurt Kingdom, we talked about what marriage is like in Vietnam and she told me that a lot of people get married young and that a lot of husbands do not work and that women work a job and do a majority of the household work on top of it.   I explained to her that it is common in the United States for women to work a job and do household work on top of that, but I also explained that most husbands work as well.   I was a bit surprised to hear that this is somewhat common...

I tutored Marcelle January 30, 2019 from 10 to 11:05 am at Gilchrest Elementary School. Today we worked on tracing worksheets for the letters A through D. As she traced the letters both in uppercase and lower case, I used a whiteboard to make dotted letters to reinforce what she had just learned. After tracing them again in the whiteboard, I would tell her to write a certain letter in either uppercase or lowercase. I did this to make sure she differentiated between the two and to make sure she was associating all of the spoken letters with the correct written form. Then we went over the French-English dictionary and looked at words that begin with the letters she had just learned. She practiced her pronunciation and I already see improvement. Next I read her a Kindergarten-level book and pointed at simple words to make the sounds together. Then I let her pick a book in the library and read it to her. I asked her questions throughout the book so she could practice her reading comprehens...

On Wednesday, January 30 th at 12:00 p.m., Yahyia and I met at CIES for a tutoring session.   He needed help with a presentation for his speaking class that he needed to present that day.   He wanted to go over the presentation with my and wanted my feedback.   His presentation was about motivation and setting goals and sticking to those goals.   Throughout his presentation, I wrote down some things he may have mispronounced or said incorrectly.   When he was done with the presentation, I would go over everything with him and explain how he could say those things correctly.   We did this about three times and he improved by using most of my feedback.   Towards the end of the tutoring session, his brother, Ali, came in and Yahyia presented one last time. From this session, I learned that Yahyia is more motivated to learn English than I had originally thought because he challenges himself a lot. I already knew he was motivated but ...

I met Sulaiman again at the coffee shop. When I got there he was working in his notebook on writing. He told me he wants to practice writing and asked me if I could help him. We did an activity where he would tell me about what he did yesterday and write down what he told me. I helped him with verb conjugations and placement. We did this with present and future tenses as well. Afterwards we talked about places he should visit during spring break. He wanted recommendations on places that weren’t Orlando or Miami. I told him he should visit St. Augustine and I showed him pictures. I also showed him pictures of Savannah, Georgia and told him that was a great place to go. He said he would like to visit one of these places during Spring Break. Afterwards he showed me a famous city in Saudi Arabia that was so beautiful and interesting. 

I met Andrea for our second tutoring session in the kitchen area of the CIES building. To begin the session I reviewed some of Andrea’s homework and helped her work through her mistakes. I can tell I’m getting better at assisting students with finding the correct answer instead of giving it to them. Afterwards, Andrea read two passages that I found on the News In Levels website and she summarized them for me and we went over any vocabulary she wasn’t sure of. Andrea said that the readings were perfect for her but they seemed too easy so next week I may bring her some more difficult readings. I gave Andrea a small book to read for the upcoming week so we could discuss it at our next session. I hope the book will be on her level. 

I met with Bao on Monday after I tutored Ngoc at Chick-fil-a. She also had a question on when to use “which” vs. “that” so I explained to her what I explained to her sister about specific scenarios that apply to this distinction and why that is. We went over examples where I had her also fill in what word she though best fit the sentence and why she thought that was. It took her a bit to understand why it was that way,  but after going over 5 sentences, she understood the concept:) Then, I helped her proofread her writing assignment about the benefits of being in CIES program and learning English. She was working on her second draft, so we were going over her teachers comments relating to her thesis statement, her main points, the flow of her writing, and her conclusion. I helped her edit her paper without telling her the right answers, I just assisted her in reaching an effective way of writing what she wanted to say, without intensely editing every word.

On Monday I met with Ngoc at Chick-fil-a to practice ordering food and to introduce her to different places around campus and different American foods. We began with having some casual conversation about our weekends, and then after we were done eating, I addressed any of her homework questions. In her grammar class they are learning when to use “which”, “that”, “who”, “whom”, “but”, etc. Ngoc understood when to use “who” vs. “whom”, but was struggling with when it’s appropriate to use “which” in a sentence. I referenced a grammar source online to refresh my memory on the topic, and then explained to her when it was appropriate to use “which” vs. “that” by writing example sentences where she had to choose which word would fit in best and why she thought so. She understood it by the 5th example sentence I gave, it was a successful tutoring session:)

On Tuesday, January, 29 th , Ali and I had our weekly conversational partner meeting at CIES at 12:00.   We wanted to learn some phrases and how to use them in a sentence and I explained to him that building vocabulary can help him become more familiar with phrases.   He told me that he is trying to learn at least ten new common English vocabulary words every day but he said that he is having difficulty in remembering the words when he is trying to form a sentence.   Because of this, I told him that ten new words a day may be a bit much and told him that he may benefit more if reduced that number by half.   He showed me a list of some of the words that he is trying to learn and become more familiar with and I told him that it may help him to look up the definition of the words and find examples of how these words are used in a sentence.  

On Tuesday, January, 29 th , Dojun and I had our weekly conversational Skype tutoring session.   He told me that he went to Saipan, which is a United States territory in South Korea.   He said that it is an island with beautiful, clear water and that it is a good vacation spot.   It is very warm there so it is good to visit during the winter months.   Afterwards, we talked a bit about coffee. Dojun said that he used to drink coffee in the military but that he does not drink it anymore.   In South Korea, coffee shops are very common and he told me that they have common coffee shops like Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts.   We then talked about how those two chains are very common in the United States but I told him that I sometimes try to go to local coffee shops and support local business.   I then explained how major chains and corporations work in the United States, which he seemed to be a bit surprised about. Like always, I would cor...

Today, January 28, 2019, from 10 to 11:07 am, I tutored Marcelle at Gilchrest Elementary. In class she had been working on grouping words together based on the vowel sound they make, so I took the green papers with the words she had been arranging with me to the library. I wanted her to practice letter recognition since she doesn't know how to read any of them and I want her to learn how to read and not just memorize the words. I decided to just do the first five letters of the alphabet for today to not overwhelm her. We sung the ABCs together, then I pointed to a letter, stated what the letter was called, made the sound it makes, and then told her to point to all of the same letters she could find. She would repeat after me and then point to each letter. She got confused a few times with a and e but she was able to recognize the correct letter most of the time. Next we moved on to flashcards again and I taught her words about royalty such as crown, king, and queen. The last activi...

On Monday, January 28 th at 12:00, Yahyia and I met at CIES.   During our session, we went over a reading passage from IELTS about research on children’s cognitive development.   The assignment for this passage was slightly more challenging than the assignment for the reading passage that we went over the last time we met.   I instructed Yahyia to go over the questions before reading the passage and then read the passage out loud.   While reading the passage, I would ask him if he knew the meaning of a word that he had difficulty pronouncing and also asked if he knew the meaning of a word if I thought that the word was not very common.   He liked that I did that because he wants to expand his vocabulary and reading comprehension.   We did not get to complete the entire passage and questions since he had to go to class. Because of this, I instructed him to finish reading and answering the questions at home and told him that we would di...

Today, January 25, 2019, I tutored Marcelle at Gilchrest Elementary for the second time. I first went over the French-English picture dictionary with her and read several pages, stopping at a page with letters starting with the letter C. She seemed more talkative this time. For example, when I turned to the page showing candy and cake, she immediately pointed at them excitedly and said their names.  Then she started talking about crepes, so I asked her if she eats them for breakfast. I think she has a lot of receptive understanding of what I say, but not necessarily productive command of many vocabulary words. She also has some trouble pronouncing words, so it was a little difficult understanding what she was trying to say. However, I got the gist of it and then asked her some follow up questions. I asked her who makes cakes and she said her uncle. She told me her mom makes crepes so then I asked her what she puts on them and if she eats it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. After th...

           For this class observation, I observed a Group 3 Speaking class. The class began with a student-led discussion by a girl who was in the level-two grammar class that I observed. She asked discussion questions and the class participated, some more enthusiastically than others. Still, it was not a problem, and what was interesting was that the teacher did not interfere at all during the presentation.       The rest of the class was fun, but less interactive than the grammar class I observed the previous Monday. The teacher was very interactive and really tried to take a student-centered approach by encouraging students to speak and read. He talked quite a bit as well, providing input for the students if they did not understand very well. Finally, the class ended with an activity in the computer lab. Unfortunately, something happened and the teacher had to leave early. There was another teacher working in th...

On Wednesday, January 23 rd at 3:00 p.m., I met with my conversation partner, Nogoc, at Starbucks on Tennessee St.   We talked about where we are originally from and I helped her with pronunciation of certain words.   She told me that she wants to learn how to drive and also wants to study in the College of Communications department at Florida State University. She has been in Tallahassee for about five months with her sister and wants to go to California since she has some relatives there. However, she is afraid that it will be difficult to learn and practice English in California because there is a large Vietnamese community there.   I learned that there are a lot of sounds in English that are difficult to pronounce for Vietnamese people so I helped her with certain words as we were talking.   She told me about an IELTS test, which is similar to TOEFL and she is trying to learn some vocabulary from this since she wants to become fluent. ...

On January 23 I observed Angel Rios' speaking class. I noticed that Rios is a very energetic teacher who likes to move around a lot and gets very excited about the students' learning. I think this is important for his class because it makes for a very comfortable environment. In this class, there was one student that had a presentation to give about another student. It was very interesting to watch and I could tell that the student was very engaged with this activity. He was even able to make his presentation humorous and that was something that made the whole class comfortable and could have lowered their affective filters. After the presentation, the students had a worksheet in which they were to define and make a sentence with a few words. The students worked on this during class and shared their answers when they were done. After the students read a passage that contained those vocabulary words and Rios went over the passage each section at a time. He explained that when re...

I met with Ngoc Han this Wednesday, also in the CIES room, right after I met with her sister. Ngoc also has a grammar exam tomorrow, so we focused on her grammar. We went over what infinitives were and what gerunds were and how we can tell the difference between the two. I gave her a few examples and showed her how gerunds work as nouns and when in the beginning of the sentence, act as the subject doing the action or receiving the action. We worked on sample sentences of changing infinitives to gerunds and rearranging the sentence. After a few practice sentences she seemed to understand and master the skill very well! Like her sister, she wanted to work on listening, comprehension, and writing, so I spoke aloud a paragraph about what I plan on doing this weekend and had her write down what she thought I was saying. We then went over any errors she had and I explained to her why they were wrong, allowing her a chance to tell me what she thought were her errors, first. She benefited a lo...

I met with Bao Han this Wednesday for tutoring in the CIES study room. She has a grammar test tomorrow so we focused on grammar that she was struggling with. For this exam, she was struggling with identifying gerunds as opposed to verbs ending in -ing, as well as, identifying infinitives. We worked on practice sentences that used the infinitive form of the verbs and asked the students to change it to the gerund form. After explaining it and working with her, she seemed to understand the concept very well. Then, we did a listening, comprehension, and writing exercise, all in one. I told her to write down, the best she could, the paragraph I said aloud to her about my summer. After I finished, I read along with her what she wrote and alluded to her errors and allowed her to try and correct them first, before I told her the answer. This exercise really helped with her listening skills and her writing. She benefited a lot from it and asked to do it again!

On Wednesday, January 23 rd from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., I met with my tutee, Yahyia at CIES. He needed help with his reading skills.   Specifically, he wanted to learn some techniques to be able to correctly answer questions according to an assigned reading passage.   He had a passage about erosion and geology that was about one page long and he had about ten questions to answer.   I explained to him that it could be beneficial to read the questions before the passage so that he can have a better understanding of what he should look for when reading.   I had him read each question and identify a main word from the question that he thought would be necessary to know in order to identify it in the passage.   This seemed to be very helpful for him and he had a good understanding of what he was reading and he also was able to read quickly.   He was concerned about reading quickly because he knew that this technique is useful but also so...

Today on January 23, 2019 I tutored a girl from Cameroon at Gilchrest Elementary School. It was my first time meeting her and already I can tell she is a fast learner. Her name is Marcelle and she is in second grade. She was in Apalachee Elementary last semester so she is new at the school. I believe she moved from Cameroon to the US last year. She cannot read or write, and has limited understanding of English. Luckily her native language is in French, so I was able to use my intermediate French skills to communicate with her. We went to the library for an hour and a half and looked over picture books with simple sentences. The first book we read was an alphabet book with fruits and vegetables, so I would say the name and then point to the item. I would ask her follow up questions like "What is your favorite food" or "what color is this vegetable?". Towards the end I started asking her to point out all of the fruits that were a certain color, or asking her to tell m...

On Wednesday, I observed Mr. Ryan’s Speaking 3 class. One student led a class discussion that she planned ahead of time. She discussed a topic of her choice, “Vegeterianism”. The teacher kept track of student participation on his phone while the class discussed the topic after her presentation. The class was randomly broken up into two groups and they discussed their opinions on vegeterian/veganism. Overarchingly, the class thought it was not smart or healthy to be a vegeterian and all preferred eating meat because of the proper protein content and vitamins/nutrients. It was a great exercise for them to freely express their opinions and ideas about real world issues. He then went over the illustration presentation and questions that they must follow and cover in their presentation. They got into pairs and brainstormed answers to the questions he presented them on the board, and as a class they discussed the answers. He showed them his own example (modeled) of what he expected of them f...

On January 22 I met Yi Luo outside of Strozier. Yi is a graduate student studying statistics. She is very fluent in speaking English but would like more experience speaking with people in English because most of her friends only speak Chinese with her. She mentioned that she struggles with confidently speaking with some of her students and professors. I could tell that she prefers to speak slowly and perfect rather than quick and with a few mistakes. I told her that the most important this is communication. And no one expects for anyone to speak perfectly. She saw the prompts for the conversation partners and thought they weren't very natural -which I agreed- and we decided to talk about our own ideas. We talked about a large variety of things from being introverts to her hometown to our favorite foods. I really enjoyed talking with Yi. We decided that for our next conversation we would meet at her favorite Chinese restaurant in town. This conversation was very meaningful to me bec...

My second observation was Felicia Ciappetta's reading class. This class was a little less exciting than the first class because the students spent a lot of time reading passages. Ciappetta went over plagiarism, summarizing, and paraphrasing during this class. She had the students read a passage, close their books, then discuss it in their own words to a partner. I thought it was very interesting that she told the students to close their books. In my Spanish reading class, my professor does not tell students to close the books and many people end up reading directly from the passage. By telling students to close their books, the students had no choice but to come up with their own words to summarize the passages. Additionally, this reading class taught me that a teacher must be flexible with their lesson plan. Originally, Ciappetta had a passage on genetically modified food for the class to read. However, the class realized that this reading was not in their CIES text book. Ciappett...

My first classroom observation was Sana McHarek's Grammar class. It was very interesting to see all of what we had been talking about in the TEFL class come alive in an actual CIES classroom. One of the ideas was using the term "Beautiful Mistakes" to describe mistakes that help the students learn. This lesson was focused on the simple future tense and the instructor began the lesson by having the students talk about what they planned to do after graduation. As the students spoke to their partners, McHarek walked around and wrote down the "beautiful mistakes" made by students so the class could later correct them together. After the pre-activity, the students said some examples of the sentences they used in their plans. McHarek wrote these sentences on the board and explicitly demonstrated how the future tense was used in them. I could tell that this helped some of the struggling students better understand the pattern of this specific aspect of grammar. The stud...

On Tuesday, January 22nd from 12:00 to 1:00, I met with Ali Talibi at CIES.  First, we talked about his newborn daughter who is about two weeks old and he showed me some pictures of her.  He is currently in the process of getting his daughter, Mila, an American passport and he showed me his Saudi Arabian passport. He was wearing traditional, formal Saudia Arabian clothing for me and he explained what each part of traditional men's attire is called in Saudi Arabia.  I learned that the white gown is called a thawb and that a keffiya is the cloth on the head that is held in place by a black cord, which is called an agal.  He told me that this attire is worn for more formal occasions like weddings, passport photos, and praying in a mosque.  I then asked him the main reasons why it is encouraged for women to wear hijab according to Islamic tradition because I wanted to hear a man's perspective on the subject.  He then told me the differences between niqab, hija...

This Monday I also met with Bao at Black Dog and Lake Ella for two hours. With her sister, we walked around the lake and I explained to them the shops that surrounded the lake, the types of events they have, like Foodtruck Thursday and Farmers Market, and what people usually do when they come to this lake and why. Also while we walked around the lake, I pointed out various animals we encountered as told them the various names we call them. It gave them both a good look at American culture and what a typical afternoon looks like in Tallahassee.  Once we were finished walking around the lake, we stopped by the coffee shop, Black Dog, where we ordered some coffee. She got to practice her ordering conversational skills and then we all talked some more. I asked her and her sister, separately, if they were having issues with any particular lesson/topic or assignment, and Bao said the biggest thing she needs help on is listening, pronunciation and conversational skills. I told her before ...

This Monday I met with Ngoc at Lake Ella for two hours. We walked around the lake with her sister, as well, and I explained to them the shops that surrounded the lake, the types of events they had, like Foodtruck Thursday and Farmers Market, and explained to her what people usually do when they come to this lake and why. It gave her a good look at American culture and what a typical afternoon looks like in Tallahassee, especially when the weather was as nice as it was! I gave her names of various animals we saw around the lake and asked her how it differs from Vietnam. She then asked me a few questions about the animals and my past time hobbies, etc. Once we were finished walking around the lake, we stopped by the coffee shop, Black Dog, where we ordered some coffee. She got to practice her ordering conversational skills and we talked some more. I asked her if she was having troubles with any particular lesson or assignment, and she said the biggest thing she needs help on is listening...

On Wednesday, I met with Bao in the CIES study room for her first tutoring session. Similar to the first session I had with her sister, I asked Bao questions about herself, such as, how old she was, where in Vietnam she grew up, how many siblings she has, what she's interested in, what her favorite subject is/major, what her favorite food is, and what she likes most and least about America. Once we got to know each other better, and I got a feel for what level she was at in her English speaking, I asked her what she struggled most with in class and what she would like for me to help her on. She told me she has troubles with listening and speaking, and that those are her two main focuses. For the remainder of the session we continued conversation and I corrected her pronunciation mistakes and helped explain and repeat things for her to better comprehend. For our next session, I told her we will focus on conversational skills and go to a coffee shop around town so she can experience ...

On Wednesday I met with Ran at 3:00 pm in the CIES kitchen for the cooking class. We learned how to make gumbo and we talked about the difference between food in China and food in America. Ran told me that she thinks the food in America doesn't have a lot of flavor or spices and it tastes bland. She prefers the Chinese food and misses it. I told her I agreed and try to make my food with as many spices and flavor as possible! We planned a day where we make some Chinese food together with a few other CIES students and their conversation partners. I was asking her about her life in China, where she grew up, how many siblings she had, where she went to school, how long she has been in America, and how long she plans on staying, what her plans are after she graduates, what is she studying, and some of her favorite hobbies. It was a great first meeting and we learned a lot about each other!

On January 18, 2019 I Skyped my conversation partner from my room for 2 hours, 15 minutes, and 26 seconds from 8:00 pm till 10:16 pm. I asked DJ a variety of questions ranging from politics and economics to social media and Christmas. In Seoul, it snows from December to February. People typically work Monday through Friday from 9-6, with a one hour lunch break in between. For greetings, people usually ask if you have eaten a meal. This is important to the people of South Korea because South Korea used to be a poor nation, so this greeting has been alive for quite some time. Since it is more conservative, people don't hug or kiss each other on the cheek, especially if they are men. Sometimes some girls and women might greet each other with a hug if they are excited to see each other, but it is usually not the case. Christianity is the most common religion, followed by Buddhism. Christmas is a public holiday and most young people consider it romantic. DJ went with this wife to a fanc...

On January 16, 2019, I completed my third classroom observation by observing Mr. Rio's Speaking 2 class. The students were working on a peer introduction project, so they were writing down information about their partner to later do a PowerPoint about them. For almost all of them, this would be the first time they present in front of anybody in English, so I imagine it can be daunting. I assume that most had already spoken to their partner the class before, because most just wrote for the class and only a couple of students asked each other a few things. The teacher put some light American pop-music in the background and walked around the classroom to see if any student needed help. This class was not as talkative as the other two classes, despite being the speaking class, but I understand because it is level 2 so they don't have the same confidence or proficiency as the students from the more advanced classes. Mr. Rios put on the board an example of a presentation outline, for...

On January 16, 2019 I completed my second class observation for Reading 3. The class read an article about FSU parking and transportation. It was interesting to note that one of the students picked up on the fact that the article was outdated because he found out the stats were not up-to-date. There were several characters in the class who had quite extroverted personalities. This class had more students than the Grammar 4 class, and I felt like the skill level varied more, but this could also be because there were more introverted students who didn't participate. The class went over the reading and students explained what the highlighted words meant in context.   I thought this was appropriate, especially at this level, because students can use context clues to figure out what the words mean, instead of having the teacher explain everything. This can definitely help them as test-taking skills when they go to take the TOEFL. The teacher also encouraged students to use tools, such a...

I observed Grammar 4 on January 16, 2019 and it was my favorite class. The topic for the day was the perfect modal and the teacher had several activities planned to review and practice this subject. First, students read a story about a maid of honor, then the teacher asked them questions using phrases such as may/might have, must have, should have, and would have. The teaching was inductive because after introducing the topic by asking them these questions, he went over the perfect modals and asked students to explain the difference between will and may/might. After this task, he showed a movie clip from "Pretty Woman" in the store scene, then paused and asked questions like what the protagonist could have done differently. This allowed students to continue practicing the perfect modal in a more direct approach, because they would realize in what scenarios they can use these type of questions. What I quite enjoyed about the instructor is that while the students worked or watc...

On Monday, January 21, Dojun and I had a tutoring session over Skype and we talked about many different topics.   We started out the session by talking about weather patterns in South Korea and the United States.   He told me that South Korea sometimes had bad air quality because of the air pollution in China.   We then talked about some common languages spoken in the United States and South Korea and he said that South Korea does not have a second language and that there is not a lot of cultural diversity like in some areas of the United States.   We then talked about some American history, specifically relating to Native Americans.   He seemed curious to learn more about it so I told him about some of the issues that many Native Americans in this country have faced throughout the years.   Afterwards, I asked him about what school in South Korea is like, specifically the experiences of many young students.   He shared with me tha...

On January 20th, I met Sulaiman at the same coffee shop. We discussed politics and the cultures of our homes. Sulaiman mentioned that Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, something that I didn’t know before. We then talked about democracy and other forms of government. During our conversation we realized that both of us studied political science for our degrees in university, so we had a discussion about different forms of government. Both of us also agreed that we typically don’t like talking about politics with other people. This conversation showed me that practice and comfortability really do encourage improvements. I noticed that Sulaiman was understanding me more easily and that we were talking about more complex things. We did use google translate quite a few times but not as much as we did for our first conversation. 

I met with Andrea on January 20th over skype. We talked about ourselves to each other briefly and she explained to me why she is learning English. She then showed me some of her graded work from CIES and asked me to help her understand her errors and how to correct them. We corrected her grammar and word choice together. Andrea was out of town this weekend so our tutoring session was limited. However, we set up a time to meet in person on Friday and we talked about what she would like to accomplish throughout my help. She mentioned that she needs help growing her vocabulary and practice speaking. I told her that I would bring some reading material for her to read with me and we could talk about the passage. Andrea is in level one at CIES so working with her will help me better understand the needs of a beginner level student.

On January 13th, I met Sulaiman for coffee. We started discussing the worksheet given to us by the CIES staff but Sulaiman mentioned that he did not understand it, so I explained it to him and we went over what I had written. Sulaiman told me that he has been learning English for two weeks therefore, he is at a beginner level. We spent a lot of our conversation using google translate in order to understand each other. This reminded me of when I was beginning to speak Spanish and needed to make a lot of pauses to look things up. This memory allowed me to have a lot of patience with Sulaiman and to reassure him that I understood what he was going through, and I was not being judgmental. Sulaiman and I talked about our favorite movies and tv shows and how we use this entertainment to learn our second languages. He mentioned that he watches things for the first time in English with Arabic subtitles, then a second time in English with English subtitles. We also talked about our families and...

On Saturday, January 19th from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., I Skyped with Dojun.  We mainly talked about politics, economic issues, and religion in the United States and South Korea. Dojun explained to me that there are two major political parties in South Korea, the Progressive Party and the Conservative Party.  The current president is part of the Progressive Party and is concerned about the welfare of the people regarding wealth inequality as well as relations between North Korea and South Korea.  He also told me that t hat many young Koreans are unable to afford to buy a house and that the economy is not the best right now. I then shared with him some of the issues that many people throughout the United States face such as child poverty, emergency management, and wealth inequality.  Towards the end of the session, we talked about religion in South Korea and the United States.  He shared with me that most people are Christian and that Buddhism is the second largest rel...

My first tutoring session was with an older woman named Manal from Saudi Arabia. This was my favorite meeting to date, for I found it to be the most eye opening; challenging the stereotypical norms I held about Saudi Arabia prior to our meeting. In the US, I find we often hear about Saudi Arabia tagged along with the words "no women's rights," "oppression," and merely nothing positive. After talking to Manal, who described Riyadh as her home that she loved and missed, it made me realize how much I was negatively judging and assuming the role of women in society in Saudi Arabia from a Western lens. I find it common that we as a western culture look down on the way women are treated in several Middle Eastern countries, from the clothes they have to wear to the fact they just recently got the right to drive. In our minds, at least among my peers, I find we view these women being forced to live potentially "meaningless lives" under the control of men. Howe...

The third class I observed was a speaking class. This one wasn't as academically informative as the others; however, it was very interesting to see the different kinds of interactions between the teacher and students. The students (obviously) all came from a variety of backgrounds, and all had unique relationships with the professor. For example, some of the students were more "sassy" when asking questions about the project they were assigned, while others were more reserved and polite. It was definitely the most interactive class I observed, and it was fun to watch the different students interact with each other. Although most of the students all came from different backgrounds and had varying levels of english skills, it was great to see them all laugh about the same thing and practice their english amongst each other. During the class, they were assigned a project of having to go and take part in a club meeting and then follow up with a presentation about it. It was in...

The second class I observed was a reading class with Mr. Ryan Flemming. I enjoyed this class and his usage of multiple different media forms to teach skills on finding the main idea of a passage, using context clues, and introducing new vocabulary. He used the novel "Rainman" as the main novel for the class and every student, including myself, had a copy of the novel. It was a small novel yet difficult enough for what seemed to be students studying at the intermediate level. Mr. Flemming made use of both the novel form as well as the movie version, having the students watch a scene from the movie, then read that scene in the novel immediately after. I believe he did this to help the students understand what they were reading with an idea of what was happening in that part of the plot before reading it. He also took several new vocabulary words from the chapter and wrote them on the white board going over each word individually before reading them in the chapter. The biggest l...

The first class I observed was a Grammar Class on January 14th. This class was my first exposure to any of the CIES classes and I found it to be interesting as well as a reminder of how little I knew about how to teach english as a foreign language. The teacher, Ms. Sana McHarek, encouraged me to be interactive with the class and to walk around helping the students with class assignments when they needed it. Doing so forced me to not only be interactive, but also helped me to realize how much slower I needed to speak with the beginner students. It took me a second to adjust and realize how difficult it can be to depict the student's current level and then adjusting my speaking level to theirs. I started trying to help by recommending how to fix every error I saw on their practice worksheets, but then realized that this is not a good way to go about helping them productively, and should rather help them solely on the errors revolving around the lesson for that day. I found pointing ...

My second conversation partner meeting was with CIES student Bao Han. Bao Han is 18 years old from Vietnam and has been in the US now for four months. She is here with her twin sister and says she loves having some family close because she misses her family back home dearly. She was expressing the diffuculties she faced when they first came to the US, and said it was a difficult adjustment being so far from home. However, she said now she feels more adapted to life here, having made several friends at FSU, and doesn't plan on returning home anytime soon. She was very giggly and positive about the USA, having visited California before coming to Florida and said she loved every minute of it. She visited Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Jose. She said she liked California better because there was more of a Vietnamese community there compared to Florida. She said she found it frustrating how there is so many Vietnamese restaurants in Florida, specifically Tallahasee, yet su...