Skip to main content

Jack TS #1


My very first tutoring session ever with TEFL was with Renata, a student from Brazil. Since I know Portuguese, I was able to understand why Renata was struggling with the subjects she was hoping to review: pronouns, modal auxiliaries and prepositions. Renata showed me a worksheet from her class that showed all the different pronouns in English: subject, object and possessive. Renata was struggling a little bit to understand when to use subject versus object pronouns, as the difference between these two is not quite as prevalent in Portuguese as it is in English. I struggled with teaching them to her at first since we had just started TEFL class, but we were able to work together to figure things out, using example sentences and simple explanations. For possessives, I noticed Renata had written the Portuguese translation next to the words, so I made sure she understood what they were in English. Discussing modal auxiliaries was less of a challenge because modals tend to have a regular pattern and just require practice and review. Prepositions, however, were the most challenging because their use can vary greatly between languages, especially since English has a quite a few, relatively speaking. We were able to come up with a few examples and review the worksheet, and I think the review went really well and Renata seemed to be understanding a lot better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ashley TS #8

My next tutoring session was with Turki. We met at the Starbucks on Tennessee Street, the usual spot, and started the session with a causal conversation about life and his short term English goals. Turki decided he didn't want to continue with the second session of CIES classes, and that he wanted to rather focus solely on passing the IELTS exam. He said he found the CIES classes to be helpful, but also distracting. He said he thinks he's gotten the most out of his classes and that it would be more productive for him to study on his own. Where I don't completely agree with his logic, it is his life and I trust his decision making. For this session he brought his own material that he wanted to focus on. This time it was a reading passage that I even found to be quite difficult, and I was once again impressed by his far reach in practice and ability. The reading passage was accompanied by a set of numerous comprehension questions that we reviewed and answered together. The qu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Danielle TS#11

On February 20th, I met with Bao Han at the CIES study rooms to work on writing and some grammar questions she had. I had her write about whatever she wanted to, using the past tense. After she wrote a paragraph or two, I graded it by telling her what was incorrect and allowing her to                   figure it out on her own. Her main mistakes were omitting key transition words or missing articles and making certain objects plural when they needed to be singular. She seemed to struggle most with past perfect continuous so I explained that further and we did examples from her book.
Post a Comment
Read more

Ashley TS #5

My next tutoring session was with Manal. Manal is from Saudi Arabia and is very serious about CIES (a common trait I found amongst my tutees from Saudi Arabia). She has two daughters, a husband, and is working towards getting her PhD. Manal is very smart and does well with reading and speaking, her biggest issues lie in the realms of grammar and listening. I always find tutoring Manal to be a challenge, for she asks intelligent questions that always put my English grammar knowledge to the test. During this tutoring session we went over a couple of homework assignments that she had gotten back for a grade. She did well on the assignments over all; however, when there was a section of the homework she didn't understand, she got the entire section wrong. There were clear gaps in her grammar knowledge, which allowed me to specifically focus on certain topics versus going over grammar more broadly as a whole. One of the topics she struggled with was personal pronouns. She could understa...
Post a Comment
Read more