Rick Shemanski TP#5

I met again with Anton. This time we met at his apartment. I first asked him about his weekend, and if we had a good time when we went out to the bars. He thanked me and said that he had a great time. I told Anton that I wanted to try a reading exercise with him. I presented him three small passages and gave him about 2-3 minutes to read each passage. Anton took notes about the passages while he was reading. After he finished reading the passages, I asked him questions about the text. Often Anton had the answer to my question in his notes, but a couple times he had to re-read the passage to find the answer. Anton did very well and once again I found that I had underestimated his level of English. He finished the exercise in less than 20 minutes.

We then took a small break, I we casually talked about Russia. After our break I then proceeded to review some idioms with Anton. I brought along a worksheet that had 10 idioms and a corresponding sentence for each of them. I had Anton describe what he thought each idiom meant. Anton struggled with this; he kept looking to the literal translation rather than using context clues to determine the meaning.  Next session I will review: using context clues to determine meaning.  I explained the meaning of these Idioms and then had Anton write them in a sentence of his own. The sentences were often simple and did not provide context clues about the meaning of the idiom.

After idiom practice, we moved on to a listening activity. I planned to show Anton a clip from the movie The American President. I gave a brief summary of the clip and of its characters.  I played the clip once and Anton did not seem to get the joke/meaning of the clip. Then I explained the clip again and paused after each important part. After explaining the clip, I played it again all the way through and Anton now understood the meaning.

I felt that the clip was maybe a little to advanced for Anton, because there is a lot of side banter in the clip that used convoluted language.  I will adjust my listening activities accordingly.