On Thursday, April 10th, I participated in my fourth tutoring session with Tatiana. Since it was a beautiful afternoon, we conducted our tutoring session outside in the CIES courtyard.
For this session with Tatiana, I began with some easy warm-up drills before moving on to a more difficult exercise. The first thing we did was a series of word pairings of very similar words to improve her pronunciation. This exercise is harder than it appears for ESL students and one in which I think many Americans, in essence, native English speakers take for granted. For example, tale versus tell and cot versus caught, just to name a couple of tricky ones.
After this warm-up drill we moved on to a simple quiz which tests the student's ability to identify the difference between words with different meanings but with slightly different pronunciations. This warm-up is a good follow-up to the first drill. This exercise tests whether or not a student knows how to properly employ: then versus than, affect versus effect, there versus their, and loose versus lose, to give some examples.
In the main exercise for our lesson, Tatiana read from a long text and then answered a series of comprehension questions. The questions tested her on how well she understood the text. In addition, I had her read the text aloud to check her pronunciation ability and knowledge of word meanings. We were also able to break down certain passages grammatically, for example, identifying prepositional phrases, clauses and certain parts of speech.
Tatiana is well on her way to becoming a strong English speaker. In my opinion, she only needs to expand her vocabulary, tie up some loose ends in grammar and continue to work on her pronunciation.
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