Sarah TP #1

This evening I met with P.J. for our first tutoring session. He is in the second grade and has been learning English and Korean simultaneously throughout his childhood. In his home Korean is spoken exclusively, so although he is as proficient as his classmates with sentence construction and reading, his English vocabulary base may not be as broad or as conversational. At first I took P.J. for being shy, but the moment his interest was sparked he came out of his shell—which briefly derailed the tutoring session, (turning the conversation from vocabulary to cats and snow cones) but also gave me a better idea of his control of the language.

After we came up with example sentences for his vocabulary words together, we moved on to an exercise to improve his reading skill and speed. When I started looking for a clock to time his reading the passage, P.J. slyly suggested that I use my smart phone—this segued us into talking about technology. I think that for our next session I'll find a game to download geared toward language learners that he can play during our break. P.J. easily surpassed the target reading speed of 94 words per minute and only struggled with a couple of pronunciations.

I gave P.J. little feedback during this session, partly because I wanted him to feel comfortable and partly because he needed very little. I plan to give him more of a challenge and more error correction in upcoming meetings.