I met with my adult tutee, Ana, for the first time today. Ana is from Brazil and I have known her for about 6 months, since she started studying at CIES. I asked her a lot of questions--almost all of the questions on the Tutoring Guidelines handout. I was pleasantly surprised by how strong her intrinsic motivation is for learning English. She said she loves English and has always wanted to study it. Ana has some strong extrinsic motivation too; she plans to take the TOEFL test in June and wants to get into TCC for the Fall. She wants to work on improving her speaking (especially her grammar and pronunciation) the most, so this is what I will focus on in my future tutoring sessions with her. I had some time left to use during the session today after she answered all my questions, so I grabbed an iB-TOEFL prep book and looked at the speaking section with her. I asked her to read aloud some of the tips they give for the speaking section and had her do a practice short-answer speaking question. I took note on Ana's grammar errors and pronunciation issues while she was speaking with me today, but I feel far from knowing how to address most of them. I will have to do some research to figure out how to teach/reinforce the grammar rules she's struggling with and find appropriate activities for her to practice using the right forms. I think addressing the pronunciation issues may come a bit more naturally, but I want to make sure I use good teaching methods so she can make progress instead of just "repeating after me" a bunch of times to no avail. I don't feel super confident yet about my ability to tutor Ana, but I think I was able to collect a lot of good information today to help me improve and work toward that end.
Date/Time: March 6, 11:55am-12:55pm
Location: CIES
Topic/Skill: Needs Assessment/Diagnostic
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