Ben - TP #3

Fumie and I just finished our third tutoring session together and her progress today was very noticeable. At the start of the session I corrected some of her monthly reports that she has had to give to her supervisors back in Hiroshima. This has become a regular activity for us, which I think is helpful because it allows for some brief grammar revision every time that we meet. Today it took no longer than five minutes, and I noticed that her mistakes have already begun to dwindle. In fact, today as we read over the reports, Fumie was quick to point out some of her own mistakes. Then it was just a matter of explaining why she might have made them and understanding how to avoid making them again in the future.
Once that was out of the way, we got down to the focus of today's session. I had given her the assignment of preparing a brief speech of why she enjoyed specific movies and what happened in those movies that made her enjoy them so much. At first, I had Fumie just give it her best shot and see how she did. It was difficult for her to articulate exactly what she was trying to say, and her vocabulary is still a bit limited, but she managed to communicate her ideas fluidly and coherently. After the first try, I asked her to do it again, but this time I wrote down some common errors that I heard in her speech. After she was finished we went over the mistakes together. I then had her try it again, and it was much improved from her first attempt. After her third speech, we went over some vocabulary pertaining to discussions of film including script, dialogue, plot, character, story, actors, directors, and then also different ways to express opinions about a movie. Additionally, I offered some helpful adjectives to use when describing how one feels about a movie, both positive and negative. I then conducted a sort of interview with Fumie concerning what films she liked and why she liked them. This also seemed very helpful for her. I really wanted to give her as much opportunity as I could to speak English herself. I realized today that speaking is most definitely the area which Fumie feels the least comfortable, but also the one which she is driven most to improve on. At the end of the session we briefly went over what we had done, and I asked Fumie to come in to our next session ready to discuss our opinions about movies again, and then to have ideas and descriptions of foods from Japan that she enjoys. For that is our next unit together, food! Can't wait.