For my seventh tutoring session with Haiqiong, I helped her
with one of her final papers. This one was a cross-cultural analysis of music,
nature, and culture through the case study of Chinese-American composer Chou
Wen-chung. Haiqiong continues to have some trouble with verb conjugation, for
example using present instead of past tense or forgetting the “to” in “continues
to say”. She also made some mistakes with articles- when to use one and whether
to use “a/an” or “the”. Since she’s at the Ph.D. level, Haiqiong is required to
write long papers that include complex sentences and vocabulary, so I
completely understand the difficulty she has as a non-native speaker. (The phrasing/word
order of sentences can even be a struggle for native speakers.) I helped her to
reword some sentences, creating a better flow. For example, rather than “I want
to end this paper by using what Thoreau ends with his book” I suggested either “I
want to end this paper by using what Thoreau ends his book with” (switching “with”
to the end) or even better in my opinion, “I want to end this paper with the
words of Thoreau”.
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