Benjamin_TP_#3

Date: 1-16-15 1:00pm
Location: Strozier Library, Starbuck's Cafe
Topic/Skill: Writing brainstorming in preparation for an in-class presentation
Feedback provided to to tutee: expressed a need for her to be more detailed in her descriptions, to not rely on worn out expressions, and that she must practice her speaking in front of others in order to lessen her anxiety

I meet again with Shuo, this time in Strozier at the Starbuck's Cafe. I had brought some TOEFL prep materials with me and was going to have her work on a reading practice set. At first I asker her how her day was going, what class she was coming from, and we talked a little about campus. I could tell she wanted to get started doing real work, however. I told her we were going to work on TOEFL materials and asked her to start reading the practice set. She was immediately embarrassed because other people were around and she did not want them to hear her poor and slow English pronunciation. I told her to not worry about them and that they were not paying attention anyway. She began reading a few sentences but then stopped abruptly as if she had just remembered something and told me she had to give a presentation the next Friday and asked if we could would on it in our next session. I asked to see what the presentation was about and from here on out we dropped the TOEFL practice and worked on the presentation.

The presentation consists of a simple introduction by the student and some basic information about where they are from and what it is like there. Shuo has a lot of anxiety about this presentation, mostly because she does not want to speak poorly and slowly in front of the class. We spent about 40 minutes diagraming what she would speak about with a bubble diagram. I put each prompt in a bubble and wrote her responses in outlying bubbles. We had a discussion in which I explained to her why she should not rely on worn out responses like "to expand my horizons" and "to better myself" in response to a question like "why do you want to go to university in the US". I told her that these responses made a student or potential employee sound like they do not know what they want. I told her that she must be more detailed and specific in her responses and to personalize them. She was surprised by the idea of making oneself stick out from other a candidates at a job interview by giving personal information in order to make oneself more interesting and memorable. One of the prompts for the presentation lead to a discussion on her "dream job", and in this discussion we diagramed vocabulary over the film industry. We talked about film job titles and I began to understand that she wanted to working film marketing, which previously she had referred to as "management". We also discussed film genre titles.

Shuo then asked me how I would respond to the prompts, so I basically told her my "elevator speech" (this is the title of the presentation assignment) of my life story, which led to a discussion and vocabulary building about Texas, rural lifestyle, and the differing names of the sexes of several animals and their offspring. She was very interested in this, as she seemed to know very little about Westerns, the Wild West, Cowboys, the ranching lifestyle, etc.

At the end of the session I gave Shuo the diagramming we had done and told her I wanted her to write at least 2 sentences for each prompt. I told her I will help her to correct this writing and she will be expected to read her presentation out loud to me several times when we meet again on Monday and Wednesday. She seemed anxious about this, so we will have to work on that anxiety.