Claire TS #6

Date/Time: March 27, 12:00-1:00pm

Location: CIES

Topic/Skill: Gerunds vs. infinitives and TOEFL timed speaking Q1

I met with Ana for the third time yesterday. I had her do another practice TOEFL Speaking question (type 1) and worked with her on a grammar topic I know she has been learning about in her Grammar class and still makes frequent errors on when speaking. It has been cool to see Ana make little improvements on her timed speaking practice. I have been timing and recording her on my phone so that she feels the same sense of pressure as she will on the TOEFL (and can hopefully get much of the anxiety about it out of her system before she ever takes the test), and she has been getting a lot less flustered and has managed to kick out increasingly well-supported, fluent responses in a short amount of time. I think the grammar topic that I picked (gerunds vs. infinitives) was a good one, but some of the materials that I brought turned out to be a bit confusing. One was an exercise from the Fun With Grammar book, and I hadn’t looked closely in advance at the answers they wanted to you choose from. They were pretty unclear at times for both of us. The other one was a worksheet that I made where she had to fill in the missing verbs in American movie titles in the appropriate gerund or infinitive form and then match the movie title with its description in another column. I knew this would be challenging for her and didn’t expect her to be able to match all the movie titles and descriptions, but I thought it would still exercise the skill well, involve some critical thinking, and introduce her to some new vocabulary and cultural information. I decided to send Ana a quick Facebook message later in the day apologizing for the activities being overly confusing and affirming that she did really well on everything; she had to leave our tutoring session in a bit of a rush because of a test  in her Speaking class, so I didn’t have a chance to say it in person, but I really didn’t want her to feel discouraged!