I saw Arif and
Amanda at CIES about an hour before tutoring. Arif told me that she misses my
class but would not be able to come because she had a test and a presentation
the next day. She also suggested meeting at 3:00 next time because that would
be better for her. Amanda agreed that that would be a good time. Amanda also
told me that she was really upset because she misread part of the TOEFL and did
a bad job. I tried to make her feel better by telling her she’ll have another
chance to take it. Giulio and Andre were the only ones who could stay for
tutoring. It was just Andre and I at first, but Guilio showed up about 15
minutes later. Since last time he suggested working on listening skills by
watching videos and talking about them, I decided to pull up the TED website
and let them pick a video that interests them. Andre chose a video under the
humor category first. He understood some of it and laughed, but at other parts
I had to pause the video and explain the joke. The reason for that was because
of schema that had to do with American culture that he did not know about. The
joke was when the speaker said he wasn’t very religious and technically Jewish,
but he considers himself “about as Jewish as Olive Garden is Italian.” I explained the concept of chain restaurants.
Giulio understood and insisted that, as an Italian, the Olive Garden food is
probably not as authentic as real Italian food.
We spent some time discussing, which I can tell helped them with their
speaking skills and trying to more quickly formulate their ideas. We did not
have much time left after that, but I showed them a good website that has
different stories. There’s a play button so that you can hear someone narrating
the story, and the transcript is also provided.
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