Ben - TP #1

I had such an awesome first tutoring session with Fumie today! Fumie is a masters student from Hiroshima,  Japan who is studying social psychology (her undergraduate is in linguistics) and is only going to be in the States for about a month and half. As part of her masters program she is learning English at CIES but after that's done she'll go back to Hiroshima to continue her studies. Today we started simple, getting to know each other and finding out about each other's backgrounds. I made sure to stress how important it was to Fumie that I know both what she would like to improve on the most in her English studies and also the types of teaching and learning that she has responded to well in the past. I also told her about some strategies that I have found helpful in language learning, specifically constant repetition and practice at home. I found out that she wants to focus on improving her speaking and her grammar most of all, with some work on her composition and writing as well. I happily looked over a monthly report she has to send to her supervisor in Hiroshima and corrected her grammatical mistakes, making sure along the way that she understood why she had made the mistake and how she could fix it. I also made sure that Fumie vocalized each of these sentences, both the corrected ones and the ones with the original mistake, so that she could get used to the speaking the grammatically correct way versus the incorrect way. This seemed to be very helpful for Fumie, she mentioned multiple times that it was very useful to speak aloud both the right and wrong ways so she could better understand how to differentiate between the two. At the end of the study session I asked Fumie to talk about movies that she likes, and if there were mistakes in her speech I would stop, correct, and explain them to her. This was great because it provided a more informal, yet still very useful, teaching environment. Because today was our first meeting, I did not want to come in with a formal lesson plan quite yet, as I did not know specifically what Fumie and I should be focusing on. Now I have a good understanding of her strengths and weaknesses and I very much look forward to our next session. Also, she totally gave me a box of delicious Japanese cookies at the end, it was amazing.