Today Fumie and I met for the fifth time. We conducted business as usual for the first section of our session, I went over some of her homework assignments and the report that she has to send back to Hiroshima. Today for some reason the report took a little longer than I had wanted it to. I got caught up in explaining some confusing grammar rules to Fumie. The thing that I have found tricky with the reports is that they are done in a semi-informal manner so it's tough to pick and choose when to explain to Fumie when formal and informal English are appropriate. But it wasn't too bad, and the grammar rules that I taught Fumie are most assuredly useful and will be helpful to her moving forward.
After the reports were through we dove right into the discussion of food that we have been building on over the last couple of sessions. Fumie again showed a great skill for learning and using new vocabulary that I had given her, even when this was our first session after she's been back from spring break! I was very encouraged, as I always am, by Fumie's willingness to learn new words, and new ways to express the ideas and concepts she intends to express. At first I allowed Fumie to have a free-flow type of speech where I just had her tell me as much as she possibly could about Japanese savory pancakes. She was able to communicate her ideas very clearly and her formal speaking had nice structure and cohesion to it. However, I noticed some recurring grammatical errors in her speech so I wrote them down quickly to review with her after she was finished. I realized today that Fumie as at the point in her English speaking where grammar and technicalities need to be addressed. She is advanced enough that communicating ideas is not a problem for her, but communicating them in the grammatically correct way is still a bit difficult. So we went over her errors together at the end of class. Today's session was over before I knew it, so I had to quickly assign Fumie some homework to work on: writing out a grammatically correct (or at least a strong attempt) version of the speaking she did with me during the session. For next class I want to go over it, and then go into our next topic of discussion which I believe will be music.
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