Claire TS #8

Date/Time: April 3, 12:00-1:00pm

Location: CIES

Topic/Skill: TOEFL Q5/Q6 and pronunciation practice

I met with Ana for the fifth time today. Since Ana has gotten a lot of practice on TOEFL Speaking Questions 1 and 2 during our previous meetings and in her Speaking class, I decided to move on to TOEFL Questions 5 and 6. These prompts require her to read a brief text or listen to a recording of a lecture or a conversation in English and then respond to a related question in 60 seconds. Ana responded very well overall to the question she answered based on a conversation, but she ran out of time on the reading and wasn’t able to produce an appropriate answer during the allotted time. I definitely want to keep doing these practice activities with Ana so she can feel more prepared for her TOEFL exam. I feel like my ability to give her valuable feedback immediately after her timed speaking practices is limited; I haven’t honed in my ability yet to assess a reliable TOEFL score, and I find it hard to focus on many things at once (pronunciation, word choice, grammar errors, overall response to the prompt, etc.) in order to give her targeted feedback on the response. I will try to take better notes or errors while she speaks next time for quick comments and revisit the recordings of her responses for more thorough feedback later if it seems worthwhile. Perhaps I could also ask a CIES teacher to help assign her recordings a TOEFL score. I brought some pronunciation games to do with Ana today that I found online. They were designed specifically for Brazilians learning English and were really effective at addressing points of difficulty for her, such as pronouncing the ends of words accurately and not mixing the sounds “r” and “h.” I found some Youtube videos with short audio clips for Ana to listen to and practice imitating for correct pronunciation. She seemed to really enjoy and benefit from doing this during our session, and I emailed her the Youtube link to do some further practice at home this week.