Jodie – TP Adult #9

Carlos and Marco met with me for our tutoring session today.  Serap couldn’t come.  Her husband went back to Turkey because his father had heart surgery.  She had to take care of their son.  I asked both of them about their level and group at CIES.  When I put them on the board, we found that Marco and Carlos were very similar in their level of English in writing, grammar, reading, listening, and speaking.  They both are 28 and 29, and it seems that they have so much in common.  One is from Peru and the other one is from Brazil.  By looking at the group numbers that they are in for various subjects, it is obvious that they both need to work a lot more on listening.  The others are 2’s or 3’s and listening is 1’s.  Since out text states that listening is 45% of all language learning and that listening ability can hinder speaking, I told them of the importance of listening skill development.  I encouraged them to be quicker in their thinking and guessing.  By now, I already had an idea of the type of personalities that they both have.  Their temperaments are calm.  I think this keeps them from being “quick” or “aggressive” in their learning.

We spent time in this session on listening and speaking.  I shared with them some stories I chose from the internet.  I encouraged them to be very alert and quick to make guesses to fill in gaps while I shared, and that they did not have to understand every word in my stories.  They just needed the gist of what is said.  I stopped from time to time to see if they understood.  We had some discussions afterward.  During the discussion time, I helped them to correct themselves as much as possible with verb tenses, prepositions, pronunciation, etc…