Sabrina TS#4

Date: March 14th

Skype at 9AM 

In my second tutoring session with So Young, we began with an article named, “Cherry Trees in Washington D.C”. I found this article on a website catered to ESL students. I liked how the top of the article had a list of new vocabulary words. This made the task a little easier for me. Before letting So Young read, I asked her what she thought the article would be about just from the title. This is a technique I saw Ms. Felicia use in her reading class. I asked her what she knew about Washington D.C and if she knew what cherry trees were. After some discussion, she read the small article. It was a piece mostly about how the cherry blossom trees surrounding the state capital is a captivating and popular tourist site and a little history on how the trees came to be. After reading, I asked her about new words she had come across. I then asked her for the summary of what she read. We then went through the vocabulary list and there were only a few words that So Young did not know. We defined the words and I gave her example sentences. We then read another short piece. This article was about a boy named Jack who had returned to his hometown after 10 years. This article had a lot of description about its setting. After reading I again asked So Young about words she did not understand. She mentioned a few and this time I showed her pictures that went with the “new word”. This was easier to do with this story because it mainly focused on landmarks/descriptions. Like I showed her an image of what a "pedestrian centre" looked like. The article had beneath it a true/false exercise which So Young completed. I then gave her a writing exercise. I asked her to write 1-2 paragraphs about her hometown, Busan, using the newly learned vocabulary words in the two texts. After she completed, I read through it quickly and asked her to read the second paragraph where I found some errors. Once So Young began to read her writing out loud, she caught the mistake she had made and instantly was able to correct it. Towards the end of the lesson, I gave So Young a vocabulary game online which consisted of an image with fill in the blanks. The words were in a bank and you had to drag the right word into the proper blank to complete the image. She enjoyed this exercise a lot. So Young expressed she wishes to learn vocabulary words used more often in historical texts. I have found of list of historical vocabulary but do not know how to make learning them entertaining. History in itself isn’t that colorful and so the words used are hard to put an image with. Overall I feel like this session I was able to get a better understanding of where So Young needs improvement in writing. As for her reading comprehension I feel I will have to find articles a little more advanced than the one we read this session.