Claire TS #12

Date/Time: April 12, 12:00-1:00pm

Location: CIES

Topic/Skill: TOEFL Q5 & Q6, syllable stress in English words

I met with Ana for the seventh time yesterday. We started by doing two TOEFL Speaking practice questions (types 5 and 6). While she was trying to listen to the recordings and form responses for these practice questions, there was a lot of noise from other students and staff nearby, so I think it was harder for Ana to focus and hear everything clearly. We ended up moving to a different location for the second half of our session to find some peace and quiet. I’ve gotten into the habit of replaying the recording of her answer and then asking her to self-evaluate after she does a question and giving her my feedback as well. I’ve found that if I listen to her answer twice it helps me to provide much better feedback and error correction. Ana felt like she did rather poorly on one of the questions, but I was able to pick out a lot of things she did well, and one of the CIES interns (from China) happened to be sitting nearby and complimented Ana on her answer. She said that she thought she did a good job. Ana is pretty hard on herself, so I was glad for her to receive some extra positive feedback. After that I went over some material with Ana about where the syllable stress usually falls on two-syllable words and longer words with certain features. She seemed excited to get some guidance on this topic. We read through the rules together and did the sample exercise and a related game. There were a lot of rules, many of which seemed difficult to think through on the fly when trying to pronounce an unknown word, but I think Ana appreciated knowing some rules like this to lean on when she feels unsure. It was also cool to see her be more receptive to a challenging lesson like this and not seem as discouraged if she can’t figure everything out 100% right away.