Ben - TP #14

I met with Glenda again this past Thursday for our second tutoring session. As I mentioned in the last post, I had asked Glenda to prepare a dictation of her own to read to me about one of her favorite movies. To start the session I simply had Glenda read to me what she had written down, I did not correct her grammar mistakes or ask her to repeat lines, I simply let her read. She really did a very admirable job on her first try. To my absolute delight she talked about a movie called Love Actually which is a movie that I also love! Unfortunately for Glenda, it is also a movie with a lot of different characters, plot points, and story lines. That being said, this movie afforded Glenda and I a great learning experience. As I said earlier, she really did a great job on her first try. She explained, with some difficulty, that the movie is about a group of different people falling in love in their own unique ways. One of them is a politician, one is a writer, another is a man who lost his wife, and one is a silly young man who caters events. Interestingly enough, there is a plot line involving a Portuguese woman and when she spoke Portuguese, Glenda could pick up a lot of what she said (because Glenda is fluent in Spanish), something that I could not do without subtitles.
After Glenda did her first dictation, I taught her ways to more effectively and efficiently tell a story (particularly a movie's). We went over some vocabulary that I had used for Fumie: plot, action, characters, script, dialogue, etc. Then I went over some vocabulary terms that were pertinent to this specific movie: catering, love, Prime Minister, widower, affair. Using context clues, Glenda was able to figure out what almost all of these terms meant, with the exception of Prime Minister which I had to go into a little more detail about. After the vocabulary exercise, I asked her to read me the dictation again. This time I took notes on common grammatical errors I heard and wrote them down on a sheet of paper. After Glenda was done with her second reading we went over these errors together and I explained why they were incorrect and how she can fix them in the future. Before we knew it, our time was up and I felt that this session was even more productive than our first.