Rick Shemanski TP#8

I met again with Ingrid. Ingrid had a lot of homework that she wanted to go over, so we spent a lot of the lesson reviewing her material. This worked out well because I had planned for a reading lesson anyway. Ingrid had two passages, from CIES, in which she had to read and then summarize. Ingrid read aloud and I listened, often correcting her pronunciation. Often we would stop after each paragraph and review what the paragraph meant. She seemed to be able to read and pronounce the words but often lacked the understanding of the meaning behind the words. Ingrid progressed at a slow pace through the first passage, and often became confused or caught up on certain words. She tried to reach for her dictionary but I insisted that she use context clues to figure out the meaning.  I underlined keywords, like, “but” and “however”, to indicate that the word had an opposite or negative annotation.

For some words I eventually had to give in, and let Ingrid use a translator. Ingrid had answered the questions about the text and only made one mistake. I told her to look in paragraph two for the answer and she found the correct answer after re-reading the text.

For the next passage, I read the text aloud first. I spoke very slow and clear. I placed a lot of intonation on keywords so that Ingrid would better understand the passage. Afterwards, I asked her if the general feel for the passage was positive or negative, and she correctly answered positive. Ingrid had to find three main points of the passage. I underline the thesis sentence, which clearly demonstrated the three main ideas of the passage. I had Ingrid also underline the topic sentence of each paragraph; she correctly identified two, but mistook the last one. I had Ingrid tell me a summary in her own words. She was able to produce a couple broken sentences that did convey the meaning of the passage. Together we worked on writing a summary for the text. Rounding out the lesson, we reviewed pronunciation of                                   -th, and –h. I used simple pairs to practice the pronunciation. H is not a used often in French, so Ingrid struggles with it.