Carlton CP #1

Conversation Partner #1, AA, for first meeting on Tuesday, March 11, 3:30-4:30pm.

I met my first conversation partner in the afternoon in the CIES lounge. He is in his second session and is in group 1. His conversational English was not very good grammatically, but I found him to be quite understandable in general. In our introductions it became clear he was a bit distraught over his placement evaluation. He told me he knew everything in his classes and hoped I could help him to be changed. I sought out a regular teacher for some information and Ryan sat with him a few minutes to hear his complaint. He explained that we have to trust the teachers and he should discuss his feelings with them. He said it was positive that he had mentioned his feelings to me and that he could discuss it with the director.

When we sat down together, I tried to get to know his interests a little bit, and avoid discussing his frustrations. We talked about his goals and they revolve around passing the TOEFL at a minimum level of 100, with a speaking requirement of 25. He said he could take the IELTS and score 5.0 instead, and that was easier. I am not very familiar with the correlation of these scores, but Wikipedia confirms his estimate that the IELTS target is much lower than 100 on TOEFL. These are not similar goals, so I may have noted incorrectly, or perhaps he is too focused on minimal efforts.

I had some materials from my tutoring lesson with other level one students in his classes, and I asked him to complete a short exercise reading and choosing between two word forms. He missed 5/16 grammatical pairs and only highlighted 2 unfamiliar words on the page. This was about the same as my other students in my estimation, so I was skeptical of his assertion that he was in the wrong classes.

I discovered that I would be observing his speaking class later. He thought this would be good for me to understand his feelings. When I attended this class, it became clear that his attitude is a major factor holding him back. I observed that he had brought no material to class, no pencil or paper. He ignored the no cell phone use rule the teacher repeated during class. He did not partner up for exercises and left his work behind at the end of class. During class, he was asked one direct question, "What is an information question?" and responded with what a yes/no question was. This was due to inattentiveness, and he was notably frustrated when he realized his mistake.

I do not know him well enough yet, but it seems I must focus some of my efforts on motivation. He is notably confident, and I do not want to be ignored when I am committing to helping him, either. So this will be a challenge for me. Any suggestions or comments are welcome, please.