Carlton TP #2

First tutee session with YY,  joined by TZ for second meeting, Friday March 7, 2-4pm

I met YY at lunch with TZ earlier and we arranged to try to stack the sessions because TZ has TOEFL class after the normal CIES class schedule. Both students are Chinese and share the same group 1 classes for the skills they are most interested in working on, listening and speaking. TZ is in group 3 for reading and composition, he said. We agreed I would meet YY after classes in a CIES room and TZ would join us when he could. This was my first opportunity to try to evaluate them both myself and see if we could work together as a small group.

I found a topical ESL lesson on International Women's Day, that was coming up on Saturday. While this is not a big American holiday, it originated here, and it often substitutes for Valentines and Mothers day in many countries. The lesson included an informative reading and many worksheets. I met with YY first and she read it while marking any unfamiliar words. There were only a few (celebrated, annual, contribution, throughout, becoming), so I thought the reading level was good. Then I asked her to read it aloud and we marked a few more that were difficult to pronounce (conditions, spread, wives, society, entertainment, politics, inequality). We reviewed all of the vocabulary and she read it again. Then I used a phrase match exercise to check retention and we used a fill in the blank transcription to check her comprehension of my brisk reading of the same passage.

When TZ joined us, YY took the role of facilitator while TG read the article silently and aloud. We discussed the cultural aspects of the holiday and I asked for original comments and corrected sentences a little. I asked TG to do a different comprehension exercise to fill in words (from a list) and we tried some scrambled sentences, but these were too confusing. Then we did some jumbled vocabulary in phrases from the text as a group activity and this was kind of fun. This is an interesting game because you reinforce words in context. By this time, they were quite familiar with the reading, so it was not as difficult as scrambled sentences.

I found that Google is certainly a teachers best friend. The computer helped me find this great lesson, get grammatical support, find pictures to illustrate a few points. I was stumped trying to explain the abbreviation "etc." that was of great interest. We spent some time on this and a few other latin examples. I would recommend the lessons from http://www.eslholidaylessons.com for the worksheets. There a some holidays you may not know like March 9, "Get Over It Day" that is now on my calendar!