On Wednesday, March 12, I conducted a tutoring session with Tatiana Engle. Her English language skills are already at an advanced level, nevertheless she is seeking to vastly expand her vocabulary and improve her grammar and pronunciation skills. Specifically, Tatiana is seeking to improve her English because it will greatly improve her business engagement skills, since everything in her work is discussed in English with clients as well as with her business partner.
As a warm up exercise, I asked Tatiana to talk about herself, her family, her country of origin and her experience in America thus far. Since Tatiana's English is already at an advanced level this was not a difficult exercise for her. She explained to me that describing her background is also a common practice for her when it comes to meeting Americans.
In our first exercise, Tatiana read aloud from news articles. We began with simple, short articles and quickly moved on to more difficult ones. After working with her to correct her pronunciation, we identified words in which she did not understand the exact meaning and then worked to define each.
Next we moved on to a grammar exercise. Tatiana sought clarification for the correct usage of certain prepositions. Explaining prepositions took some time, more than I anticipated and was a challenging and worthwhile exercise for both us.
In summary, I felt this was a very positive learning session. Tatiana has excellent reading and listening comprehension abilities and she is well on her way to becoming a strong English language speaker. In our lesson, we discovered that she benefits greatly from exercises where she has to read passages out loud. So we will continue to conduct this exercise while we also continue to work on expanding her vocabulary and attacking grammar rules.
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