Chloe TS #5 (adult)

For our fifth session, Haiqiong and I worked on her annotated bibliography. For this assignment, she gave a summary of 10 books or DVDs- for example Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States by Elizabeth Hinkle-Tuner and New Musical Sources by Henry Cowell. The bibliography was three pages single spaced, so it took me a while to read through and highlight. I could tell that Haiqiong had written the bibliography more quickly than some of her other papers based on the number of errors. I could understand most of what she wrote, but there were numerous small grammatical errors- for example, forgetting an article or using the singular instead of the plural. Occasionally her mistakes interfered with meaning enough that I asked her to reword the whole sentence. Sometimes her word choice was a bit off- for example she said some topics “jumped in her eyes” haha :) I totally understood what she meant, but it’s more common to say “jumped out at me” rather than “jump in my eyes”.

Chloe TS #4 (adult)

For our fourth session, Haiqiong and I worked on her listening journal assignment. For this journal entry, she listened to a piece of classical music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen and described it- the sound of the music, the atmospheric effect it created, etc. Haiqiong still has some difficulty with “a” and “the”, but I’m hoping with some practice she will get the hang of it. She also made some grammatical errors, especially with verb conjugation- for instance, using “proceed” instead of “proceeding”. I’ve been helping her expand her vocabulary as well. In her writing, she often tries to express a nuance of the music but doesn’t quite have the vocabulary to describe it. For example, she repeatedly used the word “broad” so I suggested some new adjectives to use- magnitude, spaciousness, expansiveness. Her word choice is sometimes slightly off, so we have been working on this too- I suggest a different word and explain why it’s a better choice.

Chloe TS #3 (adult)

For our third session, Haiqiong and I continued to work on her presentation for an upcoming conference. I read her paper and highlighted the areas that needed work, as well as making notes on the changes I would suggest. Overall Haiqiong’s writing is excellent, but she struggles sometimes with verb conjugation, word choice, and sentence flow. One thing she has trouble with is choosing between “the” and “a”. It’s so intuitive to me that I don’t think much about this, but now I understand the difficulty. For example, I told her that I would say “the listener” rather than “a listener”, although “a listener” is not technically incorrect. Even though you’re not referring to a specific person, “the listener” just sounds right to me in this context. I can explain most grammar points to her in a logical way, but something like this is difficult to express! Overall we’re making great progress, and I think Haiqiong’s presentation will be wonderful.